Flipping the Barrel EP#104 w/Claudia Jaramillo- EVP, Strategy and Corporate Development at Jacobs

I'm so so happy to be here and that we finally made it work.

Thank you, first I love the question because it brings so many happy memories about my childhood and I'm lucky that I still go back on a regular basis. So let me first describe what my hometown is like and then it'll help understand all these nice lessons that I learned. So my coffee area is a small town around 200,000 people at that time, rolling hills, very green in the morning. I keep very close to my heart. So I grew up with a very traditional family in the sense that we were very close to my grandfather, my mother's father. We would get together for Christmas, for example. I would spend time with my cousins, my aunts, my siblings. So everybody would get together and have a very traditional celebration, which is something that I still keep very close to my heart. I try to stay closely connected to my family. And then the connection to nature is something that I believe in everything that I do today, our concept of what we do in a sustainable way. So when I think about my grandfather, he was one of the big people in my life. I learned from him the first thing: the importance of education and how to respect people based on the importance they would give to core values. So that's the first thing that I would say. And to date, if you ask me the most important thing that I see is valuing people for who they are and the sense that they have, they are good-hearted people. So that's the first one. My mother inherited all that from him and she's exactly the same; she's the best person in terms of being a good person. The second one is my father; he taught me the importance of always learning. I still remember one of the roughly 12 years to become a pediatrician, you know you should be done, and he said, 'No, no, you need to keep up with all the developments of science.' So the concept of lifelong learning and the work ethics that my father had until the end of his career were fantastic. And then the empathy and the curiosity about the world and the people around it. My grandfather used to travel a lot. So my hometown had no contact with the rest of the world; there wasn't even a bilingual school. So I actually learned English on my own. But my grandfather, after he retired, he started traveling the world and he would share all these pictures with us, and I started seeing the world through his eyes and his pictures. And I'm curious about the world, curious about the people that I meet, curious about technology, and curious about anything new that I can see and learn.

Wow, lots of questions. I'll try to answer all those questions. I didn't even know what a corner office was, so I didn't have those aspirations. I was very curious, so that's the first one: curiosity. The first thing which I still keep to date was I always made decisions based on: is this going to make me happy or not? Today we talk about purpose, but that word did not exist when I was in high school. The concept of purpose was there, but when I interpret my thoughts at that time, I was really following my heart. I chose electrical engineering because I like solving problems. So it was very basic. My thinking was very much: I'm here and I want to solve problems, and I like math and I like physics. I wasn't really thinking beyond that. I just like to solve problems. And I moved to the big city. So I went from a 200,000 person city to a 7 million person city. So on my own, I was very young. I moved there but I was following a dream because I wanted to go to one of the best schools in the country. My dad even said, 'Are you sure you can do this?' But I was following that dream. And then when I moved to France and fast forward when I decided to do an MBA, I was always thinking: this makes me happy. It was more how I spent my time, where I get my energy from. So just because I was doing the things that felt right, and my parents and my grandfather and all my family taught me those core values that have allowed me to date continue to be aligned with the things that create value and make me feel good. It led me to where I am. I never had a career plan. The first time I had the concept of a career plan was when I did the MBA, and that's really the answer to your question.

Oh, you just reminded me of something, Jamie, and I love it because it's very topical now when we talk about women in STEM, which is one of the topics that is very close to my heart. You may have seen that I try to be involved in anything that we can do to have more women in STEM; we call it STEAM because arts and storytelling are important in STEM. So at Jacobs we do a lot of women in STEAM. So I remember it was probably my second year in electrical engineering. Compared to most of my classmates who were coming from large schools and the capital, what I was learning for the first time in my second year calculus or physics, they had already learned in high school. I was seeing it for the first time. So for them this was like math 101; for me it was way advanced. I had to study harder. So I started to have lots of thoughts in my head, what you call the confidence gap. I was like, 'Am I capable of doing this?' I went to my mom and said, 'Mom, I'm not sure I can do this.' And you know what my mom said? My mom said, 'You have the right to fail.' Many people, when I mentor, I tell them why it's important. The ability to accept failure as a way of learning is so powerful. Many times we quit before we even try. I use this in mentoring a lot, because failing, trying and failing, it's a way of developing muscle. When we think about fitness, we don't think that's a novel concept. We go to the gym, we suffer the next day, we can't walk, but it feels you feel the pain, you're sore. That's normal. But when we think about business or when we think about school, we don't want to fail; we always want to be a rated. But that concept that my mom gave me, that failure is okay... And then I realized yes I could, but that confidence—that was the first time I felt it.

Thank you for this, because I tell you there are things that we have inside of us and sometimes we just don't use it because we forget how much power we have inside of us. But the story is very simple. I was working doing those projects and I went to a reception. I met this guy at the reception and he asked me, 'Tell me about your job, what do you do?' I was just chatting, having fun because it was a reception, somebody was being promoted. I told him what I did and he said, 'This is what today you would think is an elevator speech.' I was just telling my story. My story is like, 'I do these projects and these are the complexity, I fly to all these remote locations, I sold solar energy systems on a private island in the Caribbean, all that.' So for me it was fun, it was connected to where I get my energy, what I enjoy doing. So it goes about complexity. I didn't even know what that meant; I was a very stereotypical engineer in the sense that I wanted to solve problems. I was given a goal and I would fix the problem and get the solutions. So I shared that with him. He then, fast forward, said, 'Oh my manager is coming from Argentina and this and that.' So I started meeting people here and there. That curiosity, I had been learning about the Euro and many different things macro and so on. I connected very well with the people he introduced me to, but I wasn't looking for a job. Then they made an offer that was very interesting, and that's how I joined. So that's really the story. We talk about connections we value, and this is not only women, also technically minded people struggle to understand, for example, how an engineer who installs all the systems is interested about the Euro. At that time nobody was talking about the Euro living in Colombia. Why do you care about the Euro? The ability to be open-minded, to be interested about other cultures. I had learned English on my own, I had started learning French on my own. So all these things are important because it allows you to connect with people. The lifelong learning concept again is important, and the curiosity.

That's a very interesting question because it involves a lot of learning and self-awareness, how you see yourself. I'll start with a couple of things. To contribute to the business, to an organization in general, it's important that you understand how the organization creates value. As you move up, it's even more important. So I think the biggest thing is to understand how the organization creates value and the business, and with that you connect to how we make money, how we develop our people, how we connect with our communities. So I would say if I look back to even at the time where I hadn't really learned how to communicate and be more articulated, I always had first and foremost the interest in creating value. The second one is people have always been what matters the most to me, and that comes from my family. In any organization I always like to develop talent. I'll take my experience in France and China, for example. When I moved to China, you can't imagine if we're talking about gender traits, the Chinese culture is the farthest it can be from my own culture. So if anything, they can say outspoken, wow, that's shocking. You can really produce a shock and use the system around you if you say the wrong things; you can be disrespectful without reading the minutes. So I'm just adding all this context in the sense that for you to have a real positive contribution, you need to be mindful of how people are going to receive your message. That core concept that my family taught me—presenting solutions. The hardest part of my life in terms of learning these lessons was when I was a teenager; I used to argue a lot with my father, I would complain a lot. Those were probably the hardest. My father would always tell me, 'You're always finding these issues, you're always disagreeing with me.' So I learned a lot of that with my father. When you present problems, you better bring solutions. That's the thing I would say: how you create value, always having people at the very core, and being mindful of what the other person is going to hear. It applies not only to contribution but to contribute to the solution. So those are there. You can say, 'Yes, she's too driven,' probably they have said some of those things. But when you say you care a lot about the people and you're bringing people along the journey, you said dreams and ambitions for everyone, you move as a group, you're a team player. That helps. We still need to deal with bias, and part of what I do today is to make sure I help everybody around me raise awareness of how difficult it is for all those who are trying to be different and trying to fit in.