... And that's my story

On this episode, I chat with Rita Gurevich, entrepreneur and CEO of SPHERE .   Rita began her career at Lehman Brothers and helped oversee the distribution of technology assets after their bankruptcy in 2008.  From this, Rita gained a deep understanding in analyzing identities, data platforms, and overall application and system landscape that had to be distributed across all the buying entities. At the same time, the enhanced regulatory environment focusing on protecting data from misuse, forced large enterprises to manage and control access more proactively across their on-premise and cloud environments.  

With this knowledge Gurevich founded SPHERE, an organization that provides critical governance, security and compliance solutions centered around the age-old access control problem that organizations face. The company has developed a repeatable and effective approach to assessing, remediating, and managing access controls across any scope. Rita has overseen the growth of SPHERE into a software and services company providing its clients with the only end-to-end access management solution available today.

 Gurevich is the recipient of multiple honors and awards including recognition from her Entrepreneurial skills from Ernst & Young, and SmartCEO, along with being on the 40 Under 40 list in 2017.  In addition, Gurevich sits on the Board of Directors for the New Jersey Technology Council.

Will Ramey was raised in the steel valley of northeast Ohio. He joined the U.S. Army when he was 17. Will had a sense of duty to serve and was looking for fun, travel, and adventure. He had an eye-opening 10-year career in uniform serving as a military policeman, logistics officer, and space operations officer, deploying to Iraq, serving all across our country, and leading a variety of teams. He has worked in the commercial sector for Target Corporation in their distribution operation. He has been an Adjunct Professor at Wilkes University. Will currently serves as a Department of Army Civilian. He is beginning to enter into entrepreneurship as leadership development coach/trainer, a speaker, and author. His 22 years in leadership positions have been a thorough experiential education in influence, perspective, and life-long learning.

Music: The Right Direction by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com - used under creative license.

Today's episode features Brooks Scott.  Brooks is a professionally certified Executive Coach and Interpersonal Communications Expert and DEI Strategic Advisor who has facilitated over 150 courses for groups of 50+ on Managing Unconscious Bias, and over 200 courses on Conversations of Race & Allyship in the Workplace.  He is an international corporate facilitator and specializes in helping executives and teams have all of the conversations that they have been avoiding having.  He brings a breadth of experience to his work as a former 5th-grade Elementary School Teacher, a former New Jersey State Trooper, former Manager of Operations for the protection team of the CEO and COO of Facebook, and a former VP of Safety.  

Ryan Hummel has been a friend of mine for some time.  Ryan has been with the firm Planet since 2010 – serving in various technical leadership roles. As CIO, he leads Planet’s Infrastructure, Security and Technical Service Delivery teams and is responsible for developing and maintaining technology solutions across the enterprise. He brings more than 20 years of IT leadership and experience. He and the team are focused on building a thriving culture that delivers excellent service in a collaborative and business-aligned fashion.

Ryan holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Columbia Southern University and an Executive MBA from Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA (USA).

This is Ryan's story about turning points in his career, and the dialogue includes several important take aways.  Be sure to listen to the very end to pick up the recap at the end of our chat.  

Thanks for tuning in- as always, you can find me at "[email protected]" for any feedback.  If you are interested in telling your story, please reach out. 

Welcome, welcome, welcome!  Thanks for checking this Podcast out.  In this brief episode, I explore why this Podcast was created.  Interviews should start being posted in mid Feb, 2021.