I'll kick it off. My name is Garrett Sauls. I'm a content manager at Innerworks. Been here for thirteen years. We're a data consulting company. Do all the data things. All the usual consulting spiel. But I always joke that I'm more of a corporate English teacher. And my goal is to just get communications out there. And mostly to to kind of give a platform to to really intelligent people to talk about smart data things. So, that's kind of that's kind of my job is just facilitating those conversations and getting knowledge out of people's brains and that's exactly why we're here today and I've been honored to collaborate with people like Annabelle on on series like this on the data forum. So, I'll pitch it over to her to introduce herself and then she can introduce our illustrious guest. Absolutely. Thank you very much, Garrett. So my name is Annabel Lincoln. I'm a Tableau visionary and Tableau ambassador. Even if like, yeah, for the past fifteen years, I have been dedicated myself around BI and analytics, and data visualization, of course, and also enablement. And that's why we see that the topic is very important. That's why we have been doing this webinar series with Garrett, which I'm very proud and very happy to participate with him. And today, it's a very beautiful honor to have BJ with us. BJ has been working twenty eight years with Walt Disney Company. She possesses a deep understanding of how data technology and development can positively impact influential organization. And, in our current role of business intelligence and reporting manager, she has a direct impact in connecting people with the detailed data they need. And I had the pleasure to be invited to one of her webinars, but I'm sure that she will tell more about initiative that she's doing. She's also very active in the Tableau data community, and she often shares knowledge in Tableau Public, for instance. So, BJ, your role is Business Intelligence and Reporting Manager at Walt Disney Company. First, wow, you have my dream job. Please hire me. That was a sign out. But before going into the enablement topic, I would love to hear more about your story and how you land in this kind of role. Oh, thank you, Annabel. Thank you for that lovely introduction. It's such an honor to get to chat with you all today. And before we get started, I just need to remind everyone that I may work for the Walt Disney Company, but I am not their representative here. So please understand that anything I say is my opinion and not any official policy that we may or may not have at the company or a way that we do things or we don't do things. I have been very lucky to get to work for the Walt Disney Company for the last twenty eight years, and it's been an honor just to to be part of the many amazing things that we have created. I I came down to Florida for a fun summer job, and I never left. That's part of the Disney magic, and I've made a million friends along the way. I started in entertainment, and then after a couple years, I worked with our operations partners, and we were actually created the first survey that I did on a palm pilot where we were trying to understand our cast behavior in terms of were they following what we then called the seven service guidelines. And I got to work in on some content management as we were learning how to do computer based training, which was new at the time. And then I got to work in engineering, building some simulations for my ride systems, which was an honor and a treat to work with that team, and econometric modeling with some advertising partners to understand the impact of ads. I've, So from marketing to human resources to engineering, and here I am now working with survey data, which is another fun and interesting challenge, and there's so much to learn, and it's just a delight. I think one of my favorite things about working for Disney is this, the many opportunities I've had to move around and learn a new skill or apply a skill I have in a different way with a different team. So it has been a fantastic journey, and I'm so thrilled with the role I have. It is such an amazing team that I get to work with. They do great things, and it is fun every single day. I love that. I'm curious, Vijay. What is it that kinda drew you to data? Obviously, having been in a lot of different departments, but it does sound like maybe that common thread is some sort of, you know, data or, you know, digital transformation focused, you know, sort sort of outlook. But what what is it that kinda kept you and keeps you coming back to these types of topics? Yeah. I feel like the thread between all of the roles I've had has been the connection between people and data and storytelling, and each of the roles finds a different way of doing that. So yeah, I started out, I was an undergraduate mathematics major, I'm a problem solver, to, I think if my school had an engineering program, I probably would have been an engineer, and in fact, did get once I was down here in Florida, I did end up getting an industrial engineering degree afterwards. But I think there is a connection between people and data, and that's been what has intrigued me about each and every team I've worked with and on the problems that we try to solve in each place. What are so in your in your role today, can you set the stage for for what that looks like? You know? Who are you working with most commonly? What would you say are, you know, generally your daily activities? You know? What's what's the stuff that falls under your purview? Even even if it's just generalized. You know? Sure. So I'm I'm working with our survey team. So one of the things we're trying to understand is what our guests think of our products, and what our guests, how we can improve our products based on the opinions that we can get from our guests. So my team is responsible for turning data into insights and pictures that can be shared with our partners across the properties. And so from a day to day perspective, a lot of the things that we work on is automation, trying to make sure that we don't, can we be as hands off as possible through the transformation, creating new data platforms for our guests, which are our internal clients, to help them understand what our guests think of their specific line of business or their specific product offering, and then help our partners interpret those as well. So we want to make sure that it's really easy to understand our data products. So we might be working on something, a new survey. We might work on improving an existing survey. We might work on automation so that we can go from, so we can really work on our speeds to insights, so help take that time down a little bit every day. Mean, so they are often like very difficult to visualize and to work with. I have worked with some of them myself, and it's always very tricky. You know, I have the best team in the world, and we have done considerable job of learning how to do that. I agree that survey data is different, and it actually is one of the things that attracted me to this role, having developed Tableau dashboards for our business cases in other parts of the business. This was one that I found that I knew would be challenging from the data perspective, and it's just such so much fun to learn something new, and to be able to learn from a cast, and we all become better when we work together. It's been an honor. Absolutely. So, the way I met you, BJ, was with your initiative on, it's called Tableau Speaker Series. Can you tell me a little bit more about it for our audience? Certainly, and thank you so much for agreeing to be one of our speakers. You are highlight, and I just loved your presentation on using personal passion projects to help develop your Tableau skills. I think that that's certainly one of the messages that I tell our Tableau community. I've been working with Tableau since I think twenty ten, twenty maybe. And I've been in a place where I've known a lot of our Tableau sales partners, and so we had some things like a Tableau Day where we would try and gather the community together, but Disney is a very wide is a big company, and we have a lot of people using Tableau across all parts of our organization, and one of the things we wanted to do is how can we bring some of the community together. So I have these Tableau days we would host, and they'd be virtual or sometimes in person, And one of the things I noticed is that the engagement was really high after one of these days, so how can we improve upon that? How can we keep that spirit of learning and collaboration going on and on between the events that we could host? So I thought, well, you know, maybe some of these ambassadors and visionaries would be willing to talk to us. And honestly, I was shocked when people say yes, and are willing to share their time and their talent with us. But the engagement's been amazing. We've had, I think, seventeen sessions so far of the speaker series. Getting to learn a great deal from the Tableau investor and visionary community has been wonderful for everyone. But also, I think it has created a bit of a community inside, improved our Tableau community inside the company. It gives everyone someone who they could talk to. They might have met someone through these virtual events. So anything I think that's one of the things about Enable is I'm creating helping to create a platform here for others to share, so I'm not the only person that's answering a Tableau question. There's so many great Tableau developers across our organization, and for me, it's a great place to learn a new skill and meet amazing people like you, Annabel. So I like that everybody else gets to do that too now. No, I mean, it's true that from when I was leading this enablement center, like we met up internally every month, and it was difficult to find always like a subject you are, of course, you have to prepare, I don't know, one month on parameter, the other month on LOD and everything, but you run quite short very quickly, even if you repeat your subject. So, I think that your initiative, finding external resources is also very useful. And for audience, how do you approach people? How do you find often I have like this question about my webinar, how I found speaker and how I convince them to participate. Yeah, it honestly, I'm shocked. I'm always amazed when I'll send out an email to someone that says, hey, I saw you give a presentation at this Tableau user group or at the Tableau conference. I thought it was fantastic. Would you share it with us again in this internal platform that I have? And I'm always honored when someone says yes. That's happened to me only once that someone said no. It's a pretty good ratio. It's a pretty good success ratio, honestly. I think it says a lot about the Tableau community as a whole. It's certainly something that I've noticed as in my tenure with it. Everyone seems to be so willing to help. Everybody wants to share their knowledge, which I find fascinating and grateful for such some willingness to every when we all lean in, we all grow. And I think that that's a testament to the way Tableau grew as a company and grew its community. Yeah. I think that that was always a big thing that that stood out. I we've been Tableau partners since, like, two thousand nine, twenty ten, and I joined Innerworks in twenty twelve. And so that relationship was still fairly new. You know? Tableau was was still kinda making inroads at that time. And even not knowing a lot about any other platforms historically, you know, analytics platforms or anything like that, the one thing that did stand out to me even then was that community focus. And so I feel like when you have that community aspect, that social aspect baked into it, you you I think of all the the really skilled Tableau consultants today that I work with, and all of them benefited from the knowledge that community gave. So there I don't wanna call it a feeling of indebtedness, but there is a feeling of I need to give back because this was how I learned. Right? And there there there aren't many. Of course, they exist, but I I don't know at the at the scale and effectiveness many other SaaS communities, you know, that are that are that are quite the same. I'm I'm curious too. This is this is an interesting thing. Maybe not being directly involved with enablement of data teams, but, you know, at what point you know with this whether it's a speaker series or another thing I'm just curious if this is a common feeling that you all have had is there a level of I'm just gonna try this and I don't know when it works and you know when you're doing the speaker series or doing all this it's going. You're like, is it working? Is it still working? You you hear the feedback. But then, you know, from Annabel's perspective, BJ, it sounds like, oh, I got to come into this, like, very established thing that is, like, you know, feels feels formalized and feels organized. But as the creator of those things, I know I created enablement structures content structures for people to like submit blogs and things but I still today feel like could it all fall apart is it working still you know so I guess this is a long way of saying at what point do you feel like oh, this is a thing now. It's working. That's a great question. I'm not sure I have a good answer for it. I like to keep tabs on how many attendees I have at the sessions, and I try to make them at lunchtime on East Coast time, which is breakfast pre arrival West Coast time, and then, of course, on our APAC and our EMEA, which are Asia Pacific and Europe, it, of course, is never going to work out get everybody on a time zone that works for But I do kind of track attendance across the various events, and if attendance starts to wane off, then maybe we'll look at doing something a little bit different. For a while there, I had a friend from the streaming side of our business and another friend from the corporate side of our business, and the three of us together would be on a phone call with the Tableau sales rep, and we'd host doctor sessions, and we would get some really good questions, but it wasn't as, we weren't reaching as many folks, and I thought, well, maybe there's a better way to reach more folks. And of course, there's a lot of products that are used within our company. This is just one of many, so lots of folks are struggling between working with all the different types of products that they have, and everybody has a question, and maybe they didn't want to wait a week to talk to somebody who might be able to answer the question. We now have internal tools to help facilitate communication for all kinds of other uses, not just about Tableau or, know, where is your database or how do I write the SQL statement, things like that. So I think across the company, and I'm sure across many other companies this is going on as well, is that there are tools to foster these types of communications and help foster these connections, which is great, because if you can find other folks that can answer your questions, we are all better from them. That's just to answer your question, Garrett. Sometimes you try things and you don't know if it will work. And they don't work. You're surprised it works or sometimes you think it will work and it didn't. So I think that each time is lesson learned. Until you to you find a good format for the audience. Yeah. I I really like to kind of that concept of how how you know, there's obviously looking at attendance numbers but I I mean, BJ, you're a survey person so I I would imagine that in terms of documenting success you have the tools to do that you know within it was within internal surveys you know if you're gonna kind of like live the brand so to speak but yeah I think just even just gauging your people like you said if you have relationships with people, you you tend to have more your your your fingers on the pulse of what's gonna work, what's not because you your people are gonna be more likely to tell you what they like if is it's working. I want more of this or maybe what shift directions or whatever whatever it may be. So, I think I think that's just another case for having strong relationships because you're just gonna build a stronger feedback loop versus if you don't have strong relationships, you might have less data, less insight into whether whatever you're doing is working or not or resonating. Yeah, I definitely poll the audience each time to see if they're getting what they want and they have someone they really want to hear from. And those those are always yeah. And of course, we have connections across company folks that are saying, oh, you should talk to so and so. They're they're amazing. I'm like, okay. They're on the list then. I love that. I'm to you. We we're talking talking a lot about these relationships. What what's the value been for making specifically relationships that are not within your own team? So, you know, whether that's reaching out to another department or or another person, You know, how how do those things come up organically? How do you spark those collaborations, and what maybe would have been some surprising results as a as a product of that? Well, I was long ago, I was taught the secret to success was a a combination of leadership skills, management skills, technical skills, and relationship skills. It it's called the LMTR model, and it's been refined over time, and I know that our current president, Jeff Volly, is very proud of it, and I was part of that at the beginning. So yeah, relationships is key to our success, and for instance, top down, This is how we, things get made, how magic, how collaboration happens. So, yes, how do we organically develop relationships? Well, of the things that I have to say that's really fun engaging about the Wellington Company, I don't know if it happens at your company, but we have a lot of opportunities to interact with each other outside of a focused work and I've met a lot of people who have helped me in my career by joining one of our sports leagues. I used to play on the monorails softball team. The monorails. That's a softball team. I did not work for the monorails. I've I'm a proud member of our walking league team, which used to be part of our facilities and operations services, but now has so many people that aren't part of that organization that we just call it Friends of Keith and Debbie. And there's a candlelight cast choir. If you ever see the candlelight presentation at EPCOT, there's an enormous choir that's all cast members. And that is a wonderful opportunity to meet people across the company. And we also have a very strong volunteering program where I have met some amazing leaders through volunteer opportunities. So those sorts of methods are great for cultivating relationships across organizational boundaries, and certainly there are areas that are really trying to encourage that, especially among data leaders in our company to help us collaborate so that, you know, a data problem in one area or a data challenge might be solved somewhere else, or just having the knowledge that there are other people doing, solving similar data challenges in other parts of the company, just to know them and to have someone to, hey, can you look at my SQL for me? Something's going on here. It's been great. Yeah, but I found out always very much more complicated to strike a relationship when it's remote, when it's not, So that's true that I understand. I am very happy to see that you were able to grow this internal community like remotely, because often, even people, I remember, they will always tell me, yeah, but why we are not doing like in person meeting? I said, because we have international company, and if I do an in person meeting, I'm excluding like these people in Germany or in other countries. I was always like, you know, not knowing what was best to do. But yeah, it's interesting. It is interesting. Even now we do a lot more virtual meetings because it and we're we're across a lot of acreage, just even at the site in Orlando, down at Lake Buena Vista. I mean, the acreage is comparable to the size of the state of Rhode Island, so just going across from the tip of the Magic Kingdom all the way down to Celebration, where I work, it's a lot easier, you get a lot more done to just get hopping on a call. But that, you still need to be in person. You still need the opportunity to collaborate, to see each other, to to to meet each other as people. I really like this is kind of a concept I think that has worked well. And when I think of how I and maybe other nontechnical people have learned Tableau specifically or anything, when we think of collaboration and relationships, kind of just emphasizing, like, the fun and the play part of it. You know what I mean so whenever someone is learning something you it it depends on the audience depends on the person you know rather than giving them a tool that's directly related to the thing that they're doing at first I have found that sometimes it's better to help someone like, hey. Just go do a fun thing with this. You know? Do a fun thing with this first. Like, find the joy of it. Use that for learning, and then you can go apply it to whatever use case that that you're thinking of. So whether it's in to your point, BJ, in person, having having that fun and that connection with with other people can go a long way towards, you know, a month down the line. Oh, they remember BJ from the volunteering event. I can reach out to her for this problem because I remember she did something with surveys and data. You know? But also, even if you're remote, if you did just like a fun thing, I know, we work with distributed teams as well. We have a European arm and we have an APAC arm, and so we know very well how difficult even virtually it is because we overlap with them an hour maybe of the day how difficult it is to even connect virtually with them. And so, you know, we we try and find things that are fun to forge those connections versus kind of like, well, I wanna collaborate with someone. Let me find right off the bat the business use case or whatever it may be, and sometimes that works. But sometimes it's just, yeah, maybe, I don't know. You know, it's it's hard to get people motivated if it's not fun. So, I think the the fun aspect, the play aspect can go a long way whether it's certainly in person but also also virtually but it is, to your point, Annabel, it's still a challenge. I feel like it's still such an uphill uphill battle to make inroads with with teams that are distributed. Speaking about in person, I good transition. During your when I was invited, you mentioned something that I was very curious, and then I checked. It's this Disney data conference, this analytic open to external run by Disney. Can you tell us? I know that you are probably not involved, but I got curious. Can you tell our audience about it? Of course. I am not an organizer of the Disney Data and Analytics Conference, but I am an enthusiastic participant and past presenter, which is kind of fun. The Disney Data and Analytics Conference has grown a lot over time. It started off, I think the first one I got invited to was back in two thousand and four, and it was just a bunch of us in a room talking about data problems across the company and how we were approaching data challenges and what each group was doing. So there was like industrial engineering and a group from finance and a group from engineering, and we all had similar challenges, but it has grown so much since then into a really professionally delivered analytics conference that is certainly worth your time if you are interested in learning a little bit of the Disney data magic happens. It is a phenomenal conference, put on so well. I'm so lucky that I get to go because I come away inspired with new connections and a little refreshing of the pixie dust, as they say. This year's conference was, we had some fabulous speakers. Steve from Pixar was perhaps one of my favorites. But yeah, if you are at all interested in that Disney as an analytics company, it's definitely worth checking out. Sorry. Sorry. I tried to. That's that's that's really cool, BJ. I think, if I'm not mistaken, I believe we've had at least one or two people on the InnerWorks side. There's a guy named Ben Basile. He actually is out of the Tulsa office, but I wanna say he went to the Disney Data Analytics Conference, oh a few years ago maybe maybe it was like just pre COVID I can't quite remember but he's he's a Disney super fan too so I there's this kind of like this melding of interest you know all in one spot so And proving that I do not speak for the company. I do believe that Innerworks was a past sponsor, but I Yeah. Can't I will not I will not pass. I can't I can't quite remember if he attended or spoke or if it yeah. I can't I can't quite I'd have to ask him. If he watches us, he'll be you know, he'll he'll let me know. But, yeah, he him and and many others obviously are are are big big fans, and they're they're big conference attendees too, people who have gone and spoken to a spoken at a bajillion Tableau conferences, you know. And Tableau conference is great, but if you were to give him the choice, it'd be Disney data analytics every year, you know. It it it is an amazing opportunity for for the and and very competitive inside the company, those that get to to attend. So it's always a real treat to get the nom that says, yes, you get to go again this year, and you get to take your team, and get to learn from some of the some parts of the company that I'm not as exposed to, like our streaming business or our Nat Geo business. It helps you remember that there's so many great leaders and so many great data stories in the company that we can share with one another and learn from one another. That's that's important. I I'll say I'll go on record as saying probably the reason I am it's I'm so I love maps. That was probably my gateway drug to data but I love maps because of National Geographic because that was a thing. You know, my my grandpa was a geophysicist. He was very interested in all these other things and so I I, you know, as a kid, I remember he's I got bookshelves of the yellow spines, you know, and thumbing through those and seeing all the maps and it's it's still the one magazine that I subscribed to today, you know, even if I don't read everything or don't have time to, like, that's that's great. But, yeah, to your point, you you forget that like, oh, right. This is, you know, this is a part of the, this is a part of the family and I can go talk to these people and see what unique challenges or or goals they have or learn from the unique knowledge that they have because you know, they're just dealing with sometimes similar, sometimes different data problems. Yeah I wish I can attend once. Next one is twenty twenty six. I'm curious, Vijay. Also, you know, we're we're talking a lot about, like, Disney Data Analytics Conference, which that's a very organized concerted effort. What does does you know, within within your organization or just even within even outside of your organization, are there, you know, user groups that you're a part of that are kind of focused that kind of help upskill people kind of have more of that overlap with like intentional connection? You know? Is is is there, like, oh, here's a Tableau user group, you know, tool specific or even here's a you know, if you're a a data warehousing person across the organization, you know, what whatever tool you're using, we can go talk about the data warehousing things. Do do structures like that exist? Or and and if they do or don't, are those things you seek, you know, outside of Disney as well within the broader Tableau community? Well, within the broader Tableau community, there was a Florida user group. There was an Orlando user group, and I think the several Florida ones kind of merged together, and again, it's one of those things that requires leadership and dedication, and not everybody has the time, so kudos to the leaders of the user groups. They do an enormous and important job of creating these opportunities for networking and content. I am definitely a past attendee whenever I can. I will certainly go to our user group meetings that are locally in person and virtually met. So like I said, I am a beneficiary of all of that knowledge and skill that everyone is willing to share in our community. So I cannot praise those leaders enough for all the tireless work they do. Yeah, absolutely. It's a lot of work. Annabelle knows, I was about to say. Annabelle runs like ten tugs. I don't know how you do that, Annabelle. And very well of a nice person. Person. And dedication, you get it right. It's a lot of dedication and wanted to get things done. Absolutely, and often it's like also teamwork, so you are not alone. You have other people that depend on you and you cannot quit. But yes. Yeah, one question that I wanted to ask you, it's more like a personal but still Did you benefit from like a mentor in your life? Did you have the chance to have a mentor, someone that inspire you like on a on a dedicated mentorship program that's or have you been a mentor yourself? What are like Yeah, I have had a lot of great leaders and mentors in my career, many of which who have provided generous and sometimes difficult feedback, which is honestly the best gift. Feedback is a gift. And I've learned a lot from different styles and different approaches and different perspectives. So, yeah, I would say that the being a mentor and having a mentor are really critical, I would say, even, to your success and your role, to have someone you can bounce an idea off of, someone who can say, am I really providing service, the best service I can to my cast members so they can grow? How can I be a better leader? What do you suggest that I should do differently? And getting honest feedback from someone is an amazing gift in helping me become a better leader of my team, I think, I'd like to think. And yeah, I have started working with others and becoming a mentor as well. It's still new to me. How can I help? Why would you even ask me? I don't know. I hope I can be provide something that is useful and informative for you in your career. So I would say mentors are definitely if you can find one, you should definitely treasure that relationship. It's valuable. Similarly, this is this is a good shout out for the first internship I had. So I grew up in a small town in Northwest Oklahoma, and I worked for their tourism department. And their director of tourism at a time was a man named Jim Curtis. Well, prior to this, Jim had cotton out to Woodward because that's where his mother was from. But he had prior spent most of his career in Orlando for the Walt Disney Company as the director of convention And so it was it was kind of this just, you know, really cool thing that someone in a town my size could have could work with someone like that with all that institutional experience from a major company. And the thing that I had learned and I think this is a commonality in talking with you BJ in terms of organizational culture. He was a mentor that taught me the value of relationships as well as the value of just going and doing. So, I remember joining that internship and it was a marketing and PR internship and he was just like, you know, we have this, we have a lot of flights coming in. I want you to kind of like maybe, you know, see see what that's about. See why people are coming here. I'm not gonna tell you exactly what to do or how to do it but I'd, here's here's an interesting thing. Go do a project on it and so, I think he was maybe one of the first bosses slash mentors that I had that said, go do and explore a thing and if you fail, that's okay. Whatever. What did you learn from it? So on and so forth but go do a thing. I give you permission to go do a thing. And sometimes there's just a lot of value in a leader or a mentor. Because if you're new and you're eighteen, you're nineteen, well, however old you are, you're like, can I do this? Can I do this? What do you want me to do? I just wanna make you happy. You know? But getting that level of permission and then emphasizing the go make relationships, go talk to people, go collaborate can be really, really immensely useful. So I just wanted to take the opportunity to shout out Jim, first mentor, who has the who has the the Disney link as well. But, yeah, those those are some really things. But as someone who is now in a position that I manage one person, but, yeah, it's it's terrifying to be like, oh, I'm responsible for their growth. You know? And what? You mean? You're asking me? Can be can be really nerve wracking but but rewarding at the same time, which kinda leads me BJ, what what have you found, you know, in your time mentoring or even just helping upskill people or grow in their skills? What have you found to be useful for connecting to people? Do you find that there are strategies or tips that work generally well across everyone or is it well depends on the person's focus depends on what they're motivated on what are just some lessons that you've learned so far you know at in that mentorship role now that you're there? You know you gotta meet people where they are and understand what their goals are otherwise I'm providing terrible advice. I'm probably providing terrible advice regardless. I'm sure you're not. I'm sure you're a great mentor. We don't allow those guests on the data forum. Exactly. Exactly. We would not have been admitted here. But, you know, sometimes we all need a little help finding where our spark is, finding what brings us joy, and how to turn that joy into something that can benefit a company or benefit someone else. So I think that that's part of the challenge of helping someone discover within themselves what they already really knew. Honestly, a leader, one of the jobs I try to do is as much as possible be a servant leader, that is to get out of the way and let you grow and give you the tools you need to grow, and only come in when you call for help, when you're like, I can't, and to come in and be that umbrella so that you can, so that my team members can absolutely be their best selves. And I feel like a mentor kind of has that same sort of responsibility, to help draw out of you what you already know, and then come in and tell you sometimes the hard truth in this calm and nice way as possible, or where you maybe should focus. So now I get jealous. So I will also say thank you to Mr. Boris for being such a good mentor in my life. But, yes, I mean, I think I had like a good leader in my past work, one who teach me that Annabelle, she was a good seller and I say, is a good salesperson and she told me, Annabelle, when a client close the door, it's not a problem, you enter by the window. Get me to think that, yeah, there is always a second way to do things. And I would say like, always reach out to the people who help you in your career, even years later, and say thank you to them, because when we want to do that, maybe it's too late. And that happened to me like, lastly, that I wanted to reach out to Mr. Maurice again, and tell him how useful he was in my career and sadly he already passed away. So that's why you have to reach out to the people that count in your career and your life. That is a great reminder of sometimes the shortness of our relationships. And you know what's what's I think what's great about those people, it's funny. Even even they I think of my first first boss, which was at a grocery store called United Supermarkets in Woodward when was fifteen and a half. And he's he's one he's just one of those people he's gotta be in his later sixties, early seventies now, but he's still working. He's just one of those people, like, he will never not work and never not be in some sort of, like, you know, mentorship managerial role. This is very much his identity. And to your point, Annabel, I had I got the opportunity. I I've run into him, you know, a a million times because where I grew up, small town. But I got to run into him as he's managing a kind of a large gas station there in in Woodward and tell him now that I'm, you know, thirty six to tell him, thank you, you know, for everything you did. But he's still surprised. He's just like, oh, you know, I mean, I don't know that I did much you know and it's funny because the I think some of the best mentors and the best leaders they don't they don't do it expecting a thank you they do it because that's just that's who they are you know that's that's who they are it's baked into their personality and I think they know they they know if you learn something from it and you benefited from it whether whether or not you have the opportunity to formally tell them or not. So, I think that's always something if you if you are looking out for mentors or looking out for people to learn from those people who, again freely share knowledge and there's just there's no there's nothing they ask in return you know. So yeah to speak a little bit about the future Vijay what do you yes how do you you stay relevant in this overgrowing market with skills and everything? I try always to learn new skills and everything. But how do you stay relevant in your job or in for the future? And how do you also enable your team to stay relevant and continue to learn? I think for me, one of one of the things that drives me just personally is is I'm a perpetual learner. My mother once called me her her perpetual student, because I was always going to take another class and learn another thing or read another book. So I have this curiosity that it just is, can't be quenched for some reason. And so as things change, I just always want to learn the new next thing and how can I use it, and I want to instill that sort of curiosity in my team to give them the space, like you said, to fail, the space to try something, and if it works, that's great? If it doesn't work, okay, well, let's try something else. But for me, just always being curious about how things work. Is there a better way? Could we can we redesign this? Can we make it different? Is there a new tool out there that would be better, faster, stronger? Is there something another way to approach the problem that I haven't thought about before? Who has another idea? What else can I, how can I steal like an artist? Those are the things that, for me, that keep me going, the things that I want to, I want to learn more about this. I want to, how can I make this easier for someone else to understand? How can I take that friction point away of them getting to the insight and finding the thing that they're looking for to help them in their business? So for me, that's what I'm looking for, is there a better way? Is there a different way? How can I make it easier for my guests and my clients to really understand their results and put them into action? I'd be remiss. It wouldn't be a data webinar if we didn't ask about AI. The obligatory question. But I am curious, whether it's AI automation or whatever. You know, how are how are you wrapping your mind around around that stuff? I think there's obviously, there's a lot of hype from kind of, like, the business business user into. But I think within technical roles, there's also, you know, a bit of, you know, skepticism or like, well, yeah, I mean, if it works and it's secure and it's smart, then great. But also, you know, every SaaS company is just like, this will revolutionize it as they always have done as this is nothing new. Right? It's just they're fixing AI to it. But, you know, what's what's your approach been like that? Because we we are kind of like on a in another one of those kind of like every ten to twenty years, there's kind of a bigger paradigm shift into how people are interacting with technology. But, you know, how how are you wrapping your mind around these things or specifically your team? How are they interacting with these concepts? Yeah. And and here, I'm gonna go and say I'm not speaking on behalf of the Walt Disney Company and anything that we might be doing or not doing in this space. I think AI in general is something that we're all trying to wrap our heads around. How can we use it? When is it providing useful information, and when is it providing hallucinatory information, and how information out of it? I think experimentation is key, spending time using the tools, trying new things. There's a lot of trial and error right now, and also understanding that every day the experience with these tools is going be a little bit different. So what worked yesterday may produce really unuseful results the next day, which can be frustrating, right? I spend a lot of, where do, how can you use AI to create data visualizations, or maybe we shouldn't do that because I just can't get the results I want. So what about the other side? How can I use it to help me understand a data visualization or explain it? Maybe that's a better use case. So I think this really plays into that natural curiosity I have about what, how things work, and keep playing with the tools until I get a better understanding of not only how they work, but how I can use them in the future. But I mean, AI has a downside as well, and we can, you there's the ethics behind it. And it can be really hard because here's the fun shiny thing, but also it comes with this burden, and I don't think we probably talk about that as much. So and again, this is only my opinions. These are not anything anybody is doing or not doing. So yeah, it's just an incredible time to be in technology with so much change. There's so much to learn, so many people to learn from, so many new things to try. It's like you got a tool in your toolbox that's brand new and shiny, and how can what can I do with this? I think it's very exciting, an opportunity to learn how to use something. Yeah that's a great answer. Think personally I kind of view it as an amplifier you know if you're putting good stuff as you know the old adage if you're putting good stuff in maybe it will amplify some stuff out. You do have to watch for distortion as you had said because sometimes it might be they might distort the signal. But also, if you're not doing great stuff or it's sloppy stuff, it's gonna amplify it. And, you know, it's it can it can invite some things. So, yeah, it it is it is an it's a powerful tool but yeah one that's definitely like a lot of people are still wrapping their minds around. Well what's the best way to use this tool for sure. We're we're in the last six to seven minutes of the webinar so we can open it up to questions. But we can certainly keep talking as as people are are filtering questions if they have them. I'm curious. This is just me as as someone who I don't work with survey data a ton. But it is one of the data formats that as a marketing person, we we do encounter. What is one thing you wish the general public, people in general understood about survey data? Good or bad, you know? Because there's there's often times people take a, you know, a lot of stock from from survey data other times people might overlook you know like a really well done survey yeah what's what's one thing maybe you wish kind of a general audience understood about working I think there's a real talent to writing unbiased survey questions, and I'm not on the writing side. I'm always impressed when we, when I see really well written survey questions out in the wild. It's always nice to see that someone spent some time to not put their opinion in the middle of their survey question. So that's one that I think is key. Pivoting is a very critical part of using survey data in a Tableau environment, and in a lot of BI tools, your data isn't straight up like financial data or advertising data where one row is a thing because of the way we have to do our calculations in Tableau. There's some complex pivoting that has to happen that you wouldn't shape their data that way, say, you're doing analysis in SPSS or some other statistical package. You would want one respondent on each row, and every question or partial question to be a column, and if you do that to Tableau, it just freaks out. And other BI tools as well. It's not just a Tableau So understanding how to pivot the data, how to do the calculations on it correctly so that you're getting the percentages both on, like, your net promoter scores or on your multi punch type questions where it's not going to add up to one hundred percent because, you you ask pick them, pick as many from this list as you would like, and then you get a stacked bar chart that shows three thousand percent, and you're wondering, does that really even make sense? Is that useful? So I think there's a lot of pitfalls to visualizing survey data, but that's what really makes it fun. Yeah. Yeah. A new challenge every time. It's totally different. I mean, you have, what, Likert questions. You have free form questions. You have multiple choice. You have Boolean. You you got it all. And then you might want to dissect it by a demographic or groups and understand the difference between how someone who is, a first time guest, is going to respond differently from someone who has visited many times. Those are things that impact how you shape your data. So knowing what you're trying to find out, what are the insights you're looking for, you need to know in advance of the data shaping, so sometimes you do have to go back and reshape it so that you can see that. I love verbatim questions, personally. There's when you give someone the opportunity to answer freely, you can gain a lot of insight. I often refer to Steve Wexler. Yes. About his blog on surveys, and he does like amazing presentations also. I always learn a lot, even if I've done like three or five survey data analysis in my life, it's always very interesting. He is definitely the king of the surveys and the proses, and certainly taught me so much about learning how to use survey data inside of the Tableau environment. We do have one question. This one may fall into proprietary, so obviously we can we can dodge. Olga is asking, how is survey data integrated into your database? Well, I mean, I don't think that this is too terribly proprietary in that, generally, you're using some sort of platform to ask the questions, and then you need to ingest them into some sort of data platform, so something that would, some sort of SQL database of some kind, and then inside of that database, you're going to need to transform it for your various users, one of which is going to be your Tableau use case. I know that's a little vague, but there's an ingestion and a pivoting, and of course, a cleaning that's going to happen, as with most of our data. Yeah. That's a good answer. Just going to type that in. Thank you for the question Olga. Yeah. I I remember so taking market research, which was essentially surveys within within the marketing program at Oklahoma State University where I went to school. And I will never the reason why I remember that class is because they, the, the professor and I loved him, was such a stickler for statistics that in that class, I made an eighty nine point four, but guess what? And it was so fun. You know, this is just a this is the pitch for the usual group project thing where like, I was doing the statistical analysis in SPSS and Innova. The the the statistical analysis was good. It was bulletproof and the reason we got on the final presentation which brought it down to eighty nine. Four total grade was the person who was in charge of the PowerPoint didn't show up. So, we had to, we had to, we just had to string it together. We had to, you know, just kind of do our best at the last minute. And he was like very good job. Really great analysis. PowerPoint could've used some work. That's a B. Presentation and how you present is very important. It is it is I mean absolutely I agree I agree but you know ostensibly we all thought like this is the easiest part come on. I look back on college and there are Cs that I am so amazingly proud of because I worked hard to get those, and I was flabbergasted that I survived some of the courses. And then there are classes where I'm like, I should have only. I know I know what I know what you mean but sometimes though you learn a lot more from those those hard onesies. Organic chemistry my wife's a physician and so organic chemistry was one of those where she's just like I listen I survived that's all that matters. Well we are at the seven o'clock or eight o'clock hour for Annabelle the one two two pm pm two two pm hour which which kind of wraps it up for us but I just I really wanted to say thank you so much for joining us today BJ I think it was it was wonderful talking to you and hearing about your experience hearing about what motivates you hearing about all the top secret you know trade secrets at Walt Disney Company no not at all but just just hearing hearing your experience during the recording. Know. But I really do, I really appreciate it for showing up today and talking with us. Oh, it's been a delight. Thank you for inviting me. It's been so nice chatting with you and Annabelle. Well, great. You very much. Yeah. With that, I'll bid our audience. Adieu, nice to see you and hope to talk to you again soon. Yes. Maybe we can meet at the Disney data There you go. There you Somehow. Thank you very much. Bye.