>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube, covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE media. >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Vicki Mealer-Burke, she is the Vice-President and Chief Diversity Officer at Qualcomm. Thanks so much for joining us, Vicki. >> Thank you, Rebecca, it's great to be here. >> So, before we the camera's were rolling, you were describing how you've been at Qualcomm for 20 years, but you've been in this job for one year. And you're the first person to ever hold the position. >> That's right. >> So, tell our viewers how it came about. >> Yeah, I have been at Qualcomm almost 21 years now, and mostly in product development, product management, and then, my last role was as a general manager of one of our wholly-owned subsidiaries and I really thought that my run at Qualcomm was done, because we're consolidating a lot of our businesses. I started working on some women's programs while I was shutting down our last business, and it just so happened, it was the same time the company decided to create a chief diversity officer. My initial reaction was, "That's so great, we're going to "get one of those people, and we really need them." I wanted to be a champion for that person, and then I started getting myself interested and thinking that I could really be a change agent and a leader for the company. And kind of leave a legacy back to the company, a company that's actually been really, really good to me. >> So, when you were thinking about this job, you described it as a business problem that needed to be solved. And as someone who'd been at Qualcomm for two decades, how did you define the business problem? >> The way that my brain works is, I'm a problem solver and that's why I got into product management. And so, I really thought that if the company saw this as compliance or some sort of regulatory issue, I would really have no real interest, but I really knew that we could solve the probably by likely re-engineering some of the processes that had been in place. And, Qualcomm has had a tremendous growth over the years, and we've ramped from, I was employee 5,000 to now well over 30,000, so many of our processes really just had to be re-engineered. And I knew that I could speak that language to our leaders, we understand re-engineering problems. So, I really tried to get down to root cause and focus on a couple of the areas that would really make a big difference, and discuss the business value of why we were doing this. >> So, what are the areas that you are focusing on? Just give our viewers of a sense of the the top two or three areas where you think you can have the most impact? >> There's really two levers that I'm focused on. One is talent acquisition, so continuing to bring the best and brightest minds, the most innovative people in the world now to help us move our wireless technology into the 5G world. The possibilities are endless so we need all kinds of bright minds looking at this from all different kinds of directions. That's the diversity piece of it. The second big lever is, once we get them in, we have to keep 'em. I mean, this show shows how talented women engineers are really at premium, and so the more we're hiring, the more we're losing people on the other side. People call that the leaky pipeline or the leaky bucket. So, I'm working on retention programs to make sure that once we get our diverse talent in the door that we can keep them by really supporting, promoting, progressing them, making sure that they have wide variety of opportunities and that they see a bright future for themselves at Qualcomm. >> So, are you starting new programs? Is this about mentorship, is this about making sure there is flexible work? I mean, what are some of the nitty-gritty things that Qualcomm is doing? >> Yeah, we have started a series of sessions with our senior-most leaders, what we call, like, our directors and above. We have terrific support at the C-level at Qualcomm, terrific support. But at a 30,000 person company, you really need to get into that next couple-down layers. And so, we're doing training about, basically, how to run an inclusive team, how to empower. One of the big things that we're training on is the process of, how do you pick people for that next big project? And, like many managers, they go back to the people that have been successful year after year. What we're trying to do is disrupt that and either create, like, a apprenticeship, product leader positions where someone can tag along and lead and understand how those projects were run so well. But that's what we need to do is really try to expand the project opportunities, that's when people get a lot of visibility, a lot of experience, and that's where their own talents will just then accelerate them through our levels. >> You were talking about the need to make sure that a couple rungs down from the senior brass, really understand that there is a real business case for diverse teams that are collaborative. How receptive are these managers in your experience, and what do you say that really tips them over? >> So, Qualcomm is full of extremely bright people. There's an awareness and the benefit of the doubt that we're giving all of our employees is, "Let's give you the "facts, let's make you aware, let's let you drive the "solution, so that we're all working together." We don't have any kind of quotas, we just want to make managers, give them all the data and have them make good decisions, and empower them to be part of the solution. That empowerment need is where we're building trust with those managers. We're not saying, "Oh, you've been doing it wrong for "a million years." We're saying, "Here's what you can do to get better. "Here's what you can do to have a more engaged team. "Here's what you can do to have a more empowered team." That leads to productivity, productivity goes straight to the bottom line, and it makes sense. So, we're trying to do it more in a partnership, giving them the respect that they've earned with the positions that they're in, and empowering them to be the change. >> So, earlier in your career, you worked on some really exciting projects in terms of wearables, in terms of smart-cities, in terms of home-base technology. Do you miss the tech, I mean, do you see yourself going back and working in that? >> Yeah, it's a great question. When you're in the business, there are daily, weekly, incremental successes. We fixed that bug, we got that contract, this is really more, I call it kind of like forming jello, it's hard to get those feelings everyday like you're making progress on something. I do miss the technology, this is the biggest problem I think I've ever been tasked to solve, so that is extremely inspiring, and luckily, I get to work side-by-side with a lot of our best technology leaders. But, I do miss the technology, for sure. >> And working in the business? >> Sure. >> So, you talked about the, sort of, difficulty with measuring incremental progress, and then really we're at a point in time where the Google manifesto and Travis Kalanick's antics are front-page news. Is this discouraging, or is does it make you more excited by the cause and what you're doing? >> There are aspects to it that are discouraging, but I am really a glass half-full type of person, I think shining the light, really shining this big, bright light on the issue makes 99% of the people in our business really say, "Wow, I can't believe that's really going on." So, I actually think it's good, it's allowing us to have these conversations which are uncomfortable and a lot of leaders want to have the conversations but they don't know what to say. So, all of these things coming out in the press just give us that entry to be able to say, "Let's talk about it." And we've been doing that at Qualcomm, we do it with our employees, I want people to feel free to ask questions and not think that they should know it all. This is actually a fairly new area, so we've got to allow all of our leaders to have a level of comfort, but also know they don't have to be perfect in every single thing they say, just be inquisitive and really start the discussions. >> When you are pitching Qualcomm as a potential employer to young women, what is your value proposition? We heard Fei-Fei Li during the keynote talk about there is a real crisis if women are not actively involved in creating the next generation of artificial intelligence, and we're half of the end users, that there is going to be this real disconnect between the technology and how it's used. >> And as a product leader, I have always been fascinated by these public stories of product failures that no one was trying to make them fail but it was very clear that they didn't have a diverse team, because they just had some really big misses. So, one of the things we talk about at Qualcomm, you know, we're a wireless technology company, we started with 3G and now 4GLTE, that whole wireless technology, that backbone of it, is all Qualcomm tech, and it allows us to go into 5G. 5G is where the thing gets exponentially more interesting, more exciting, a much lighter set of problems to solve can be solved through 5G. So, if we don't have a diverse set of people thinking about all the different use-cases, variables, that we can use 5G technology, we'll miss something big. And I know that our CEO believes that, we've talked about it, we are inventors, we are innovators, and we have to have a wider variety of people that are being inventors of the future. >> So, I just want to wrap up here but finally ask you about this conference, this is not your first Grace Hopper, and it's a very young conference and you're really looked at as a veteran, I mean, me, too. We're the old bags about this place. (laughing) Can you just describe a little bit, I know you said that you were introducing one of the keynote speakers and you got to meet a personal hero of yours, just what it's like to be here? >> It's really amazing, last year was my first year. I was not the Chief Diversity Officer a year ago, yet, and I came here and people like, Telle Whitney, who you read about, I've gotten to meet here, I can hug her. >> Rebecca: You'll never was your hand again. >> I know, it's amazing. The women that have been leading this for years and years and years, and now what this has turned out to be, I was talking to one of my colleagues, and I go to a lot of technical conferences and business conferences like CES, CES is almost where we should be here meeting in the middle, a lot more men here, in years to come, and a lot more women at CES. And I think that's when we'll know that we're actually making progress. >> Well, Vicki, thank you so much for joining us. >> Yes, thank you, thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we'll have more from theCube's coverage of the Grace Hopper just after this. (upbeat music)