468- It's Usually Our Fault w/Alexandre Quinze

Alexandre Quinze studied engineering with a sandwich degree at Seattle U, lived through Y2K and the dot-com bubble in Silicon Valley, and went on to work in Brazil, Germany and Mexico, at Flex, and at Philips as CIO for Latin America, based in Panama. His starting point is blunt: "it's usually our fault." Walk into a room of C-levels and talk bits and bytes, and nobody follows. A professor taught him early that you only have to understand the CFO well enough to understand the CFO's pains, so as an IT executive he did internships in every area, FP&A included. He never discusses ERP versions with stakeholders: "They don't care about that."

He brings the examples. A startup getting ready for Series C ran on a simple version of QuickBooks while investors asked for a consolidated balance sheet; he proposed a month-end close and an FP&A tool first, then a middle-ground ERP instead of an SAP project that would cost millions. At a waterproofing company in Brazil that served 800,000 small shops, he asked how rain affected sales and which shelves were empty, then started with simple inventory capture so salespeople could go where there was no stock. His question for his teams: "do you want to be a donut shop or are you going to be a trusted advisor?"

On security, he uses FAIR (factor analysis of information risk) to put a dollar amount on risk, like a SCADA network at a mining company, and he classifies the crown jewels and tags the data so AI can be used without the sensitive data leaving. He says 75% of incidents come from humans, and one phishing campaign he ran had a click-through rate close to 90%, so with an unlimited budget he would invest in behavior change. He closes with the doctors who held back from new technology, the Viking boat, and the advice he would give his younger self: study psychology. His bicycle model: the rear wheel is people's needs, the front wheel is their desires.