The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

Clayton Rose got the upper hand on COVID-19. Rose is the President of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and he has overseen the successful reopening of his school for the Fall 2020 semester. By reducing the on-campus student population; implementing strict testing, social distancing, and masking policies; and producing a stream of clear and continuous health reporting, the school’s COVID cases dropped from three to, as of the airing of this episode, zero. (Yes, *zero.*) Rose humbly says: “The congratulations really belong to our students and faculty and staff here” who complied. Rose acknowledges that redesigning the fall student experience required being iterative, knowing that “there are going to be things that we're going to try that aren't going to work exactly right, or sometimes are not going to work at all. And you have to be open minded to adjusting or changing or just putting aside” whatever fails to make the grade. In this back-to-school episode of *The Resonance Test,* producer Ken Gordon, who recently sent his own daughter to Bowdoin, throws a series of questions at the president. They talk about the importance of having first-year students on campus (and how non-first-years feel about this), reconfiguring collegiate space in the pandemic era, the intricacies of designing an effective COVID dashboard, and why his community needs to stay vigilant if they’re to keep the virus off campus. Host: Kyle Wing Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Over the last 40 years, says Jit Agarwal, our VP of Enterprise Products, supply chains have “become very strung out, very long, very complicated, very convoluted, and very, very diverse.” This has made them brittle, a fact that the pandemic has brutally exposed. Denis Grishin, our VP and Supply Chain Practice Leader and Agarwal’s interlocutor for this episode, adds that for the longest time, “the name of the game was productivity”—but supply chains’ efficiency “did us a disservice.” Plug in your earbuds to hear their ideas about creating more resilient supply chains today (Grishin says, for instance, that you should “try to cut out the complexity that’s not really contributive or additive to your business”). The pair toss up some agile answers to the questions of the inquiring Ken Gordon, on topics such as demand partnerships, streamlining, future-proofing teams, and forecasting (“Forecasting is ultimately an inexact science. The forecast is always wrong,” says Grishin. “The reality always is something else”). Tune in, and you’ll learn not just about where supply chains are headed—you’ll also discover Agarwal’s secret nickname! Well, sort of. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

We need to talk about electronic medical records. Dr. Danielle Ofri certainly does. Why? The physician-author of the newly published volume, *When We Do Harm,* tells our Jonathon Swersey, on the latest episode of this podcast: “I was just tearing my hair out” because a patient requested a biopsy report and she spent nearly 45 minutes trying to extract it from the EMR. When Ofri says “now it falls on the clinicians to somehow find time to customize the EMR to make it workable,” you get a vivid sense of how EMRs contribute to physician burnout. Ofri, it turns out, has all kinds of strong opinions. Listen to this episode and you’ll learn, for instance, how *shame* functions in the world of medical error. (After making an error as a second-year resident, she says: “It took me 20 years till I could talk about and write about it.”) Ofri also discusses the naming of medicines, the common good and American healthcare, and what it’s like to practice medicine during the current pandemic and prepare for the next one. Attend to Ofri, *Resonance Test* listeners. When she speaks, she does good. Host: Kyle Wing Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

In our remote present, people—a group that includes *you*—have been left to their own devices. This means we must all develop a capacity for learning. Fast. Today’s guests have a deep understanding of why we should reskill ourselves in the next normal. Sandra Loughlin, our Head of Learning Practice, and Jit Agarwal, VP of Enterprise Products, give *Silo Busting* Producer, Ken Gordon, 762.5 earfuls of what it means for contemporary workers to experience and harness facilitative anxiety. The pair talk about many relevant topics, including the shift in mindset needed for this moment. Loughlin says the explosion of remote work has led to the rise of “a different mindset of management. Instead of thinking about seat time or being visible, their focus is shifting to outcomes.” In this environment, she says, employees must think about agility and resilience. Agarwal adds that they should think about their particular jobs, companies, and industries and figure out how can stay ahead of the curve by developing a “bleeding-edge skillset.” They also talk about mentoring in the age of “figure it out” or FIO and discuss common online training tools and the importance of feedback. This learning is as easy as listening, so unclog your ears and get smart. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Want to get schooled on innovation and higher education? Talk with Andy Boynton. Boynton is the John and Linda Powers Family Dean at the Boston College Carroll School of Management. He’s also a long-term friend of ours (we helped [BC redesign their core curriculum). As we’ve been lately thinking about the higher-ed experience, we decided to invite him onto *The Resonance Test.* In this informal-and-informed conversation, our Toby Bottorf, who knows a thing or two about college administrators, chatted with Boynton about the fundamental nature of design thinking, in and out of the classroom. Boynton talked about ideas and competitive advantage and the importance of the “connective tissue” of innovation. He spoke of time (“Spending time up front makes it faster in the long run. And by the way, it’s gonna bring success faster”) and cost (“Throwing a lot of products and services out and seeing which ones stick sounds very expensive to me”). As for BC’s own innovations, he says things have been “incredibly collaborative all summer across the university” and that they’ve prepared for this by, um, working with us. “You don’t flip a switch and say, ‘OK, let’s innovate together, let’s collaborate. You gotta have the right culture in place.” Host: Kyle Wing Editor: Kip Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

We’re not talking about your grandfather’s cybersecurity. In our remote present, cybercriminals have many—too many—new opportunities to inflict damage on our vast out-of-the-office workforce. To obtain some much-needed perspective on security during our inherently insecure era, we brought in our Sam Rehman, Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and Jit Agarwal, VP of Enterprise Products, to answer some questions from SILO BUSTING producer Ken Gordon. Their informed, pointed, and occasionally scary answers—on topics such as cybersecurity training and education, automation, and trust—have arrived just in time. As Rehman says: “The attack surface is just expanding.” With criminals phishing and impersonating their way into our digital lives, infecting our computers with malware and ransomware, we’ll need to rethink cybersecurity. Seriously. Trust us. Better yet, trust but verify. Host: Alison Kotin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Who’s the person you really want to speak with during a pandemic? Why, a digital epidemiologist of course. And so we rang up John Brownstein, Chief Innovation Officer of Boston Children’s Hospital—and a former *Resonance Test* guest—so we might all benefit from his particular expertise. In this conversation, our Jonathon Swersey talks with Brownstein about population health monitoring, the collection of COVID-19 data, the relaxation of regulations during the pandemic, and why it’s a good idea to watch, closely, what happens on social media and in hospital parking lots. If you're part of the population whose life has been affected by COVID-19, you'll want to listen. Host: Kyle Wing Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a test for innovators. The immense challenges of the situation have called for fast, scalable solutions—and two of the more prominent approaches have come to the fore: open source and crowdsource. In this episode of *The Resonance Test,* we interrogate some people who’ve played essential roles here. Dr. Freddy T. Nguyen, Co-Director of the MIT COVID-19 Challenge, Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, and a Pathology Resident at Mount Sinai Hospital, has done tremendous work convening teams from across the globe to crowdsource pandemic-related innovation. His conversation partner is EPAM Continuum’s Duncan Freake, a mechanical engineer who is one of the brains behind GENTL Mask, our open source design that employs readily available materials and a simple manufacturing process to enable localized manufacturing. Our Ken Gordon peppers the duo with questions and gets some really interesting responses, giving us an important look at how partnerships, humility, and especially networks functioned in their pandemic projects. “The value of a network is really investing in good people who have the right spirit and the right motivations,” says Dr. Nguyen—and we think that these words are not just true: they also describe both himself and Duncan.

The good news is: We’re open for business! The less-than-good news: It’s not a smooth process. The staggered, partial, uncertain return to our old professional haunts has arrived. Sort of. For some of us. It’s complicated. To sort out what’s actually happening in our offices, we brought together Jitin Agarwal, VP of Enterprise Products for EPAM, and Ken Gordon, EPAM Continuum’s Principal Communications Specialist and *Silo Busting*’s Producer, and got ‘em kibitzing. Together they hash out what executives are worried about regarding the reopening, contact tracing at the office, the demise of the business handshake, the tricky matter of office access, open sourcing our way through the pandemic, and more! Host: Macy Donaway Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Retail is—slowly, slowly—reopening. The industry has been walloped, but it’s striving mightily to rally. What will retail’s next normal look and feel like? What will it take to make the restart safe, human-centered, and economically viable? To find out, we turned to Buck Sleeper, Director of EPAM Continuum’s Restaurant and Retail Innovation vertical, and Jitin Agarwal, VP of Enterprise Products for EPAM. Since Agawarl recently wrote about the rebirth of retail and Sleeper has long been interested in retail’s physical and digital merge, our Ken Gordon thought it was an appropriate time to toss some questions in their direction. Together the guys are optimistically cautious, or cautiously optimistic, about throwing an open sign on the industry’s big door. But they recognize that the industry is moving into new extremely new territory, and it must move with care. As Sleeper says about his most recent shopping experience: “I'll admit, I made it about 10 feet in the door, turned around, drove home, and completed my purchase online.”