Ep. 163 – SADA Systems COO, Dana Berg

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Our guest today is COO Alliance Member, Dana Berg the COO of SADA Systems. 

As Chief Operating Officer, Dana Berg is driven by the singular mission of identifying and implementing innovative solutions that create competitive advantages for our customers. With over 20 years of experience in the information technology field, he has developed a passion for building and leading high-powered teams that deliver customer-centric services with consistency and quality.

Dana began his professional career with PricewaterhouseCoopers/IBM. While working for some of the world’s largest customers (Honda, Fluor Daniel, Baxter, Beckman Coulter), Dana began to appreciate the value of delivering excellence on complex engagements through the execution of proven project methodologies.

With an early focus on Enterprise Content Management within the Life Sciences industry, Dana leveraged his expertise at the global biotech Amgen where he implemented some of the world’s largest regulated solutions supporting the information needs of Clinical Operations, Manufacturing, and Medical Affairs.

Building on this experience, over the past 10 years Dana has since specialized and been a thought leader on digital transformation. Working closely with the best technology providers in the market, he has been responsible for leading strategy and providing operational management for some of the country’s best delivery organizations. At SADA Systems, Dana continues his passionate work for customers by leading all delivery and service functions within the organization.

Dana received his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering & Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC).

 

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• How to play and offer humor into your relationship with your CEO without it getting in the way of your professional relationship 
• How to handle company politics among 400+ employees 
• Cultivating a people-first work culture
• What to do in the first 90 days coming in as the COO/second-in-command 
• What makes a company sell for a maximum valuation, and go through the process so it doesn’t intimidate your employees 
• What’s a success like for selling to a Fortune 1000 company and how do you prevent yourself from being strung along
• How to stay agile and nimble when you’re a big company 

Resources:

Connect with Dana Berg: LinkedIn 

SADA – https://sada.com

Connect with Cameron: Website | LinkedIn

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Before we jump into this episode, you need to know about two important ways that we can help you and your company grow. Number one, check out the COO Alliance. It’s for COOs, presidents, VP ops, or whoever is your company’s second in command to the CEO. The COO Alliance is the world’s leading community for the second in command, and it gives COOs the tools and connections to grow themselves and the company. Head over to COOAlliance.com to learn more about our members, the results, the program, and our 10X guarantee. If you qualify for membership, you can set up a complimentary call with our team to discuss if it’s right for you. I will tell you about number two in a bit, but first, let’s start this episode.

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Our guest is COO Alliance member Dana Berg, the COO of SADA. As Chief Operating Officer, Dana is driven by the singular mission of identifying and implementing innovative solutions that create competitive advantages for our customers. With many years of experience in the information technology field, he’s developed a passion for building and leading high-powered teams that deliver customer-centric services with consistency and quality.

Dana began his professional career with PricewaterhouseCoopers, IBM, while working with some of the world’s largest customers like Honda, Fluor Daniel, Baxter, and Beckman Coulter. Dana began to appreciate the value of delivering excellence on complex engagements through the execution of proven project methodologies. With an early focus on enterprise content management within the life sciences industry, Dana leveraged his expertise in the global biotech Amgen, where he implemented some of the world’s largest regulated solutions supporting the information needs of clinical operations, manufacturing, and medical affairs.

Building on this expertise over the last several years, Dana has specialized and been a thought leader on digital transformation. Working closely with the best technology providers in the market, he’s been responsible for leading strategy and providing operational management for some of the country’s best delivery organizations. At SADA Systems, Dana continues his passionate work for customers by leading all delivery and service functions within the organization. Dana received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Southern California USC. Dana, welcome to the show.

It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Thanks for allowing me into the illustrious COO Alliance. I’m excited about joining.

It’s going to be a great organization for you. We are adding a pile of new members too. We are trying to keep the bar up too. It’s been nice. Tell us a little bit about SADA. What exactly do you guys do?

We are headquartered in Southern California, Los Angeles, specifically North Hollywood. We operate all across North America, including Canada. We are in the business of providing digital transformation services with a singular close alliance with Google. We are Google’s number one worldwide partner that finds ways to help our customers take full advantage of how Google approaches the market of transformation.

We help them in areas of how to approach cloud as a main theme, how to buy it, the financial ramifications of how to adopt cloud in an organization, and then how to optimize it and control it thereafter. We have world-class professional services organizations that go one step further and take upper mid-market and enterprise-scale customers through the journey of transforming their applications that have been historically living in data centers or maybe living in other clouds and trying to figure out how to modernize that so they can stay relevant, nimble, and modernized so that they can achieve their business objectives through the power of the cloud.

Are your customers all enterprise-level customers, then?

It’s all enterprise upper corporate, as we like to call it, but Fortune 1000 and Fortune 2000, that’s the place we play in.

Have you been with SADA for a few years now?

I have been, and it’s been a great journey. I always like to say that we are building the company that we have always wanted to work for, progressive in our thinking. I use a term that people are probably getting sick of hearing, but people over profit impact over EBITDA. We put our people first before anything. Having that vision or that North Star that we follow has created a beautiful, wonderful special place filled with great people who love working here, and they stay here, and all that goodness gets passed to our customers.

Put people first before anything.

What was it about SADA that attracted you then in a COO?

I have had a long career working for both very large organizations, and I did have my own opportunity to work in smaller organizations, whereas COO, I built those up and went through M&A processes. I have always found that there is this wonderful thing about having the scale and infrastructure and means that a large-scale organization has. I have always loved the agile nimbleness and family-like feel that comes with a bit of a smaller organization. First off, SADA has that. We are blessed in many respects and being a leader in what we do, so we have the means to provide the things for our people and customers that only the big guys can.

We are still at that perfect sweet spot size to where the line that most of us can draw to the fruits of our labor and efforts. We can see the impact there, and I love that about SADA. We’ll talk about my ideas on how to keep that going as we add hundreds of people every year because that will always be a challenge. I fell in love with the vision and the passion. I have a great, wonderful, and beautiful relationship with our CEO, who is a close friend of mine. It starts at the top, and we are very close and connected, and that helps too.

How many people are in the organization now? Can you speak to that?

We have about 400. We’ll be north of 500 at the end of 2021.

Your CEO?

His name is Tony Safoian. You won’t have a hard time finding him as I joke with him every single day because he’s on LinkedIn with five million posts a day. Most of your readers will probably already be connected with him because of the number of followers he has. I like to play and jest with him as much as I possibly can.

That makes it fun. How did you guys divide and conquer the roles between CEO and COO, and what does the leadership team look like at SADA now?

The way that we divide it is Tony, our CEO, focuses on the outbound market, demand gen, and keeping top of the funnel pipeline coming in. He’s heavily involved in the alliance side of our business, as well as guiding a lot of the sales and marketing functions. I play a role in that too, but I like to say that with all the promises and the crazy ideas he commits to, I will run all of the operations and the fulfillment engine of the business to make those things a reality.

I look after the operating plan and put together the budget, oversee and make tweaks and turns the knobs on that throughout the day and measure the performance. The fun part is leading all of what I call the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and all of the divisions that are in some way, shape, or form part of the machinery that are fulfilling promises, executing professional services, pre-sales, post-sales support, and all of those things that constitute the bulk of the headcount, but also are the ones that are meeting the service obligations that we make in the market.

I have watched you, and we have spoken a couple of times before. You’ve got a lot of good humor and a little bit of sarcasm in you. You must be from the East Coast. Are you from the East Coast?

No. I’m a born and raised valley boy from Southern California.

You got a little bit of that Philly sarcasm in you. How do you play with the CEO, joke around like that, and not get it misconstrued when we are working so fast? Are you cognizant of that humor? I am like that too.

I was interviewing somebody, and they were asking my management style, and I responded to this question. I like to say that we are all employees. We are all “colleagues,” but if we can’t find a way to embrace the humanity in each of us and embrace the things that make humans feel like humans, which is this perfect, great, and wonderful thing that includes humor and a bit of levity. Sometimes sadness, frustration, anger, and all of those things. We cultivate an environment where it’s okay and very accepting to have a degree of authenticity to allow that to transfer into the workplace.

Work Culture: We’re all employees and colleagues, but we need to find a way to embrace the humanity in each of us and embrace the things that make humans feel like humans.

You can do that while maintaining exceptional professionalism. Some people think that you can’t do one and do the other. You certainly can. I also know since many of the people that read this show are very interested in that CEO and COO relationship, you can’t operate like that unless, first and foremost, there’s an incredible degree of trust, and trust is everything.

You could talk about your own style and the way you communicate. If you are sarcastic, witty, shy, or introverted, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, if there is trust in how we interact, you always know the place that they are coming from. It does take some time. Sometimes in these types of relationships, it takes a long time to cultivate that trust. I happen to be very fortunate that with me and my CEO, that trust was formed very quickly and almost right out of the gate, which doesn’t happen too often, which is something I’m super grateful for.

What do you think you did that helped build that trust? I was hoping that’s where you were going to go. It goes back to the part of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team that, within the absence of trust, everything else fails above it. How did you establish that trust, and how do you continue to build that trust between you and maybe also flip it between you and some of your direct reports too?

I knew when taking on this role, one of the things that I was very clear about, and Tony knows this, is that you can’t be effective as a COO unless you have full access to everything. We are talking public information all the way down to very private sensitive information. I believe that that’s not something you get on day one, but it’s incrementally shown in how you deal with those sensitive topics each day in and day out. I call it the vault. We discuss, work on, and talk through things of great importance all the time.

You have to know and be very smart about how you transmit and deal with that information. You do it every single day in different ways. It helps if you know the ethos and the belief system of the other person and you see their decision-making. You see them interact in a room with a group of people, and they see you echo the same types of things that they would echo and vice versa, and you start to create a bit of shared consciousness, and the more that shared consciousness is created over time, then trust will follow.

I do the same thing with my team. It’s creating a degree of awareness, what we are doing and trying to achieve, and being very clear as to what collective intelligence we all need to be on the same page about. If we are not all achieving collective intelligence and you have a high degree of alignment, then you are going to have situations where things happen, and you are not on the same page, and then you are breaking things down.

How do you work with a team of 400? You are at the stage now where company politics exists. How do you orbit that or break down politics, silos, and turf wars? How do you work around that stuff, through that stuff, or is it part of the deal at this point?

I have been in smaller companies that have had a lot more politics than here, fortunately. I am a betting man, so this is not uncharacteristic of me. If I were to bet, if you poll our employee base, you would not find what they would say is that there are politics inside of SADA. We poll our employees every single month, and we do employee NPS every single month.

People experience is the top priority for us, and then customer experience and partner experience we’ll ultimately then follow. I believe that because we make that the centerpiece of our message in every single town hall and annual meeting, we preach the working dynamics of healthy functioning teams where if there’s something bothering you, you go and be direct and embrace feedback. You learn to respect different views. We talk about that.

You have to do it like a rhythmic drum all the time. If you do that, what happens is, naturally, politics don’t become a big thing because politics occur when you’ve got back-channel conversations. You’ve got things being discussed that are secret, and you don’t go to the source when you have to deal with things. When I hear that or someone brings something to me, one thing that avoids politics is I could dive in and solve that problem directly, or you can push that down and say, “You solve that direct.” The more you do that, and the more my team does that, and their teams do that, it’s a natural remedy for, “Those types of channels and routes don’t work the way that I need to work,” and then everyone gets ingrained them on how to channel it go. I hope we continue to do that as we add so many people.

Politics occur when you’ve got back-channel conversations. You’ve got things being discussed that you know are secret, and you don’t go to the source when you have to deal with things.

I like that you measure your employee net promoter score monthly. I also like that you have it as your number one priority in the organization because you are right. Once we focus on the NPS first, the customer NPS comes second, and then revenue and profit follow fast after that. What’s your employee net promoter score, and what tool do you use to measure it?

We have a net promoter score that is now north of 70. We read that like a hawk, and we read every comment. It’s all anonymized in every town hall that we have. Now we do those weekly for everybody in the company for a half hour. We meet as a group. We encourage it, and we get them going. I forget your other question.

Do you know what software it is or what tool you use to do that?

We are using a very primitive form of a Google form, and then we aggregate it into a data warehouse that crunches the NPI score and then visualizes it in a dashboard. It works. We looked at some other tools and things, but in truth, the simplicity of it is beautiful.

It’s all you need. I was talking to a company that only has 30 employees. They are like, “What do I do?” I’m like, “Walk around with a pad of Post-It notes. Give everyone Post-It notes and a pen and say, ‘Here, fill it out. Turn your back and have them drop it into a paper bag.’” You got all 30 people, and he goes, “That’s amazing.” When you got 400 people and the NPS of plus 70, you are in a good zone with positive 400 people, so that’s good. Let’s go back to when you were entering the company as COO coming in. Did you come in as COO originally?

I did.

People always ask, “What do I do in the first 90 to 100 days?” What did you do in coming in?

Number one, I’m a big believer in not making any major decisions fast. I have seen that story play out, and I don’t think it works. Personally, without sharing this with anybody, I knew I needed a good quarter to acclimate myself to the business despite the fact that I have been in this business and this type of business for many years. Every business is different, and it’s got its own nuances, and you don’t know it until you start living it for 12 to 16 weeks. That was number one.

I will tell you what I did do, and Tony and I joke about it. I have the book somewhere else where we went out to lunch a couple of weeks or three weeks after I got there. I pulled out my notepad, and under two pages, it basically described not my evolution over the course of the next 30 to 90 days. It was inferred, but it was my CEO’s evolution over the 30 to 120 days. What I said was, “Success looks like this to me. If I begin to see you in 1 to 5 months, evolving into you doing more of this or that, less of this or that, to me, that is going to be my guidepost as to now reverse engineering the kinds of actions that I need to now then work on such to where I unlock him to do the job that he needs to do.” That’s how I planned it. I planned my role and action plan on how I needed his action plan to change.

It’s interesting how you started to lead up right from the beginning with that as well. I want to go backward before SADA. You mentioned off the cuff something about going through some M&A stuff. Were you part of companies that were acquired? Were you part of companies that did some acquisitions?

I had always been on the sales side. Prior to coming to SADA, I had been a partner in an organization in which we ran a process and got bought and acquired. That experience, in part, was some of the reasons why it was attractive to come here because immediately upon coming into SADA, we ran a similar process to divest a good portion of our business. I was a big part of running that process for the first ten months I was here, and it was the same type of business that I had sold a couple of years prior. Those processes are grueling. I’m sure you’ve been through it, but at the same time, they are a lot of fun and filled with a lot of adrenaline.

Walk us through what you learned and what would make it successful for people that want to sell their company. I’m coaching four companies that are all positioning to sell. They have engaged with an M&A firm to help them sell. What makes a company sell for a maximum valuation? What makes it easy for them to sell? What do you have to do so that you don’t blow up the team and scare the crap out of everybody during the process? Give us some of those thoughts.

I will highlight maybe 2 or 3 things that come top of my mind. It’s probably hard, given the diversity of the businesses that are reading. First off, there has to be command of your projections, and you have to bring out all the evidence to show that the plans are consistent with past performance. What helps with that, I know in places I have had before, is if you do have a business model with any form of reoccurring revenue, we love that. Our business is built and predicated on reoccurring revenue. If you have that, it’s a fabulous thing because you can model and project that, and it’s a nice guarantee of revenue. I think that’s great.

Work Culture: There has to be a command of your projections, and you have to bring out all the evidence to show that the plans are consistent with past performance.

The second thing is, in my experience, sometimes this tendency when you are running a process to isolate the M&A team to a super small set of people to avoid the knowledge of this getting out in an unprotected way, so you can’t control the narrative, and then having the downstream effect of that. If you are too conservative with that approach, the people that you need in the process to strengthen your message will not be involved. Buyers do not want to see the strength of the financials, but they want to see the strength, caliber, and depth of the people. It would be easy for the CEO and the COO to do all the talking, drive all the things, and do all that. They probably, at that stage, already have a degree of faith or confidence in you because they see us more.

I have done it twice. One is the old way where you have the 2 or 3 major leads, the CFO, COO, and CEO to run everything. I have done it in another way where through NDA, through legal paperwork, we broaden that net a little wider to a select group of people that you know you can trust. If you can get them an active participation in the process and you can begin to get them forging the types of relationships with the counterparts on the buyer’s side, it represents a sentiment of strength, and it looks more like a machine. It doesn’t look like this business is built on the heroics of 1 or 2. I found that to be very strong.

How about on the acquisition side when you were divesting a company? What do you think you learned there? Same idea.

Same thing. That was a little bit different because we divested that. We called that moment a couple of years ago our existential flex. We subscribe to the beliefs of Simon Sinek a lot in our company, and we follow his guidance on things. He talks about this concept of, at once or twice, maybe if you are lucky in the journey of a corporate company as you are on this path to an infinite game, you might perform one existential flex. This means this dramatic move to catapult your company on a completely different course, and you are doing that to advance your just cause.

We did that a couple of years ago by taking a twenty-year-old business and selling that off. It was a great and wonderful business. Doing it so that we could redirect our emphasis and focus into what our highest growing business was and unbridle ourselves from that, not having any channel conflict and to put all of our energy there. In that process, a divestiture is a little weird. You’ve got to carve out things in ways. When you are carving out, you have to make the buyer understand and make sure that you are providing a fully functional unit that’s not dependent upon the other machine.

That takes a lot of work, and you got to get smart as to how you draw those dividing lines. More importantly, as you do it, it’s a change management exercise, a massive communication side both externally as well as internally. I would stress internally as importance to where those that are left behind are now part of the new normal that is now on a path to execute a very different type of long-term company strategy. They have to be brought along as to why you are doing it in a very transparent and very simple way. We spent a lot of time with that team thereafter, making sure that they bought into that vision, and so far, it’s been the best thing we have ever done.

Simon was on our board of advisors back at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? five years before he did his TED Talk.

He’s great.

When Simon flew out to Vancouver to meet Ryan and me to see if we were real because he’d read the book from Fortune Magazine, he had a five-person ad agency in New York and wanted to see if our company was real. He brought me a rosemary plant because the article in Fortune talked about me inhaling rosemary to inspire me. We have got some pretty crazy stories about when getting to know each other and becoming friends way back then.

We had one of his guys who are on his team speak to our company a few months ago in one of our all-hands.

You didn’t want to pay Simon’s $100,000.

We chose to forgo that.

I probably had emails begging Simon to start charging for speaking events because he wouldn’t charge it. Nobody would book him.

Now, look at him.

You talk about the Fortune 1000 and selling into these big firms. What are the pitfalls to selling to some of these big firms, and how do you know when the big firms are not going to buy, and they are stringing you along because that’s sometimes what big corporate does? They don’t say no. They pass you to the next department, and then all of a sudden, you are eighteen months in. What’s the success of selling to them? Secondly, how do you prevent yourself from getting strung along?

Generically in any business, there are some warning signs. If this is a heavily procurement-driven process on behalf of the customer, and they are the shield behind the buyers, and you don’t have a lot of access to it, immediately right there, you got your red flags up. The first question we ask is, “What’s the strength of our relationship with KOLs, Key Opinion Leaders there that are going to be instrumental in these decisions, and how strong is that relationship?”

If the answer is little to no relationship there and all we know is the buyer or the procurement buyer, that’s a low success rate probability of acquisition. If you know those folks, you get brought into what that process will look like early. As procurement gets involved, you are already ahead of the game. You’ve been involved there in the beginning.

With us, there’s another dimension that also helps. I imagine it’s the same with a lot of people in different businesses that you can win in the enterprise, not on the strengths of only your brand. You can align with larger brands that are bigger that will endorse and push forward the efficacy, value, and impact that we have had in other places.

We can have them tell that story which will sometimes come with more merits. It’s no secret that we are an all-in-Google place here, and we are Google’s biggest advocate and biggest partner by most accounts. Even outside of a specific deal, we spend a lot of time cultivating that relationship, showing them our loyalty, credibility, what we do, and how we do it.

We work very openly with them transparently, almost like we are extensions of their team. Why? It helps our team get a little bit more connected. To your point, when we are going into an enterprise, we sell together. If we are in there with a partner that has even more enterprise credits than even maybe we might have, it’s a wonderful and beautiful thing that you can have that relationship with a partner and then do it together. I would always be looking for ways in how you can strategically partner to better affect the outcome and also provide a better service to the client.

Always look for ways to strategically partner to affect the outcome better and ultimately provide a better service to the client.

Talk about how you stay agile and nimble as a 400-person company and working with these big corporate. Are there systems, mantras, or methodologies you guys use to stay agile and nimble when you are big?

We have got tools coming out of our ears now. I don’t always love that. Being a technology company, we have a technically savvy work face that harnesses technology to help streamline collaboration. We have some conviction in this thing called Google that helps with that too. I don’t know why, but Google is why we picked it.

The way we structure our teams is very intentional. We try to decompose them into groups that have an affinity with each other, creating shared accountability. Whenever of reorgs and of how we structure our people, I always think about, “If they were to get into a room, would they be able to identify very crisply and easily what their own specific charter is?”

If you can’t define that very well, then what you are dealing with is a bunch of apples and oranges in there, and I don’t think that team is built for agility. We try to keep decompose it to a point where you are so connected with a competency area, or sometimes it’s a geography lens, and sometimes it’s a vertical distinction. There’s a little bit of an incentive model there, too, sometimes. It naturally creates a degree of streamlining the decisions that need to be made, hence creating agility and nimbleness.

You mentioned the whole people-first culture that you have as well inside SADA. What are some examples that you use to think about?

I never go on Glassdoor and stuff like that, but I’m told I do. It’s like, “Look at this place called SADA.” We have won every Best Place to Work Award and have for several years. We have an amazing people operations team that wakes up every day not thinking about HR processes and how to slow down the progression path of promotions. They wake up every day as their top priority, and they are thinking of, “What are we going to do to enrich culture?”

I have a wonderful head of people operations. She goes to bed every single night, not worrying about is the company protected from this, that, and the other, which a lot of HR people think is their top charter. She goes to bed at night and wakes up every single day thinking about culture. What that translates into is over-communication to the point where some may think, “This is getting crazy.” We meet as an entire company for a half hour, 400 people every single week. That’s led by our CEO and with guests that come in all the time. That’s an example of people first.

Is that town hall style? Is it more state of the union?

It’s town hall style. We do some different things there. We highlight the first home time buyers and show pictures of their houses. We highlight personal things that are going on in life, like someone who got married. We are still able to do that at 400, and we’ll still be able to do that when we are even 1,000 to some extent. The other thing we do, which is a people first, is part of what I was saying about embracing humanity. On the day of this interview, we are watching the George Floyd verdict. That’s a massive society-impacting event that’s going on, and everybody has feelings about that.

Everyone has to acknowledge that. We have had a lot of things that have gone on that have been in the social injustice camp. There are some things as a leadership team where you can ignore that and not talk about it. What we try to do, and this comes from the top, and I give all credit to my amazing friend and leader Tony, is we bring those things to town halls and force the uncomfortable acknowledgment of what’s going on. That’s a scary thing.

These are contentious and serious topics, but what it does is we feel like we have a degree of a role to be a bit progressive and force some of these conversations that we think are good for humanity and society. More importantly, what they do reminds us that we are humans over employees. We think about these things. We see this stuff on CNN and the news. If you ignore it, then you are ignoring the fact that we are humans. I love the fact that we bring that stuff up and talk about that. I love how it encourages us to be a little bit more authentic.

Work Culture: We are humans over employees.

I know you said that you look at Glassdoor and don’t know. I will tell you. You have a 4.8 out of 5 rating on Glassdoor, which is extraordinarily high, with 198 reviews so far. It’s super strong. I want to ask you one more question before we wrap up. If you were to go back to your 21 or 22-year-old self, just leaving college, and you wanted to give yourself some advice that you might listen to because we never listened to anybody else. What advice would you give yourself back then that you know to be true now?

It’s true. I had a team meeting and laid out some of my expectations for the year. Those expectations were outcomes, but they were characteristics of what I wanted my team to model. I used this word called the Flight Attendant Rule, which is you can get barred down and burdened by bad news or issues that prop up. As you know, the more you get up in the organization, and my leisures are progressing, maturing, and taking on more responsibility, sometimes only the bad news rises. My advice, and I counsel myself on this every single day, is this Flight Attendant Rule. There might be smoke coming up the engines, and the plane might be rattling a little bit, but the flight attendant can’t be the one that’s freaking out when that stuff happens.

The flight attendant has to have a degree of calm, control, and optimism. Why? For the sake of the sanity of the plane. If I were to go back to my 21-year-old self, I’d worry all the time. I was a worrier. In many ways, the worriness probably was part of the strength that stimulated me to work so hard, but it affected me, and it was something that was always there. I have naturally learned that part of the work-life, especially as a COO, is par for the course.

You have to know how to tackle those things with a craft that you work on with a muscle that you build that is working out. As you see them, you got to breathe and relax. You got to see the optimism. You got to portray hope. Rather than first portraying anger, frustration, and coming down, you got to tone that down a little bit, and it’s something that I have learned along the way and something that I preach.

Dana Berg, the COO from SADA Systems and the COO Alliance member, thank you so much for sharing with us on the show. I appreciate it.

The pleasure is all mine.

Important Links

• SADA
• Tony Safoian – LinkedIn
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

About Dana Berg

Experienced leader with a demonstrated history of working in the management consulting industry. Skilled in Business Process, Requirements Analysis, Enterprise Software, Enterprise Architecture, and Agile Methodologies. Strong professional with a Bachelor of Science focused in Computer Engineering & Computer Science from University of Southern California.