(US and Canada) Alex Golbin, Chief Data Officer at Morningstar, speaks with David Mariani, CTO and Co-Founder of AtScale, about the importance of leadership in data space, acknowledging the true potential for team building and paving ways to simplify data literacy.

Golbin moved into the research sector from the technology sector. "As a software developer, I was doing programming and systems analysis but I always wanted to be on the receiving end of technology works," says Golbin.

Regarding his engagement with Lehman Brothers, Golbin says that he availed the opportunity to shift from technology to fixed income research. At that point, he recalls, he was a novice who didn’t know what “bond” meant, and gives credit to Lehman Brothers for believing in him. He acknowledges Lehman as a "tremendous bond house." He further mentions his work at Blackrock, where he was a fixed income asset manager, noting that his experience at Lehman helped him become better at that job.

After gathering years of experience at those organizations, Golbin is now focused on Morningstar. "What I’m trying to bring to the table is essentially an appreciation of what people do with the product. If you’re building cars and if you have never driven a car, it’s very hard to imagine the drivers’ experience." Both  Lehman and Blackrock taught him the importance of appreciation with regard to what happens when the product is released. Golbin firmly believes that empathy and appreciation go a long way in uplifting living standards and promoting economic well-being.

Goblin, noting the business side of his job, says he considers himself a non-technologist. Being a part of the technology team, he thinks beyond the traditional lines of technicalities when it comes down to business. He explains how, at times when the products fail, it is considered that the wrong technology stack was used, and the product needs to be re-built. 

"Probably 99.99% of the time, when they don’t come to your product, it’s not because of the wrong technology stack, it’s because you’re solving the problem while you’re answering the wrong question,” Goblin says. He uses the analogy of climbing the wrong mountain, asserting that as a CDO, he aspires to make sure that he and all the team members are climbing the right mountain.

Golbin then sheds light on data literacy and the much-asked question, "How do you educate the organization to be data literate?"

By definition, literacy is the art of reading and writing," he points out, and technologists are only aware of the reading part in data literacy. "If they don’t speak human, there’ll be very little data literacy on the other end," Golbin adds. He maintains that the concept of data literacy starts with storytelling, and there is a need to simplify the complexities of data literacy so that it is widely understood by the ones on the receiving end.

Explaining the qualities he looked for while building a team at Morningstar, he recalls the words of a friend, "To build an extraordinary product, you need extraordinary people because extraordinary people can do ordinary work but ordinary people cannot do extraordinary work." To this, Golbin adds that he believes most people have extraordinary qualities, however, the trick lies in aligning their capabilities with the work that needs to be done.

He further points out that while building a team he would focus less on the required skill sets, and would rather choose people with a promising runway. He maintains that it is difficult to decide on that during a short interview. However, he tries to understand the key factor in each individual and then work that out to the best of their abilities.

"I believe that motivated people are a hundred times more productive than unmotivated people. I’m trying to understand what gets people motivated. And if it seems to be culturally aligned with what I believe, that makes the rest of the organization motivated."

Delving further into the discussion, Golbin affirms that some of the best minds he has worked with come from the liberal arts background. He states that skill sets are learned and developed while working. A person can learn C++, Java, and Python if they have the right potential.  He adds, "If I could learn fixed income, people can learn anything."

Golbin concludes, everything eventually boils down to, "we either win as a team or lose as a team."  As a leader, says Golbin, "We got to give people the benefit of the doubt and if they fail, they fail. But nine times out of ten, they’ll surprise themselves and they’ll surprise us, and if we owe our leaders in the past, that trust and risk with our career, we owe it to the next generation of leaders."