(US and Canada) Jason Beyer, Vice President of Data & Analytics, Bridgestone Americas, speaks with Jason Masker, Field Chief Technology Officer at Stratascale, an SHI Company, about important leadership qualities, diversity, and  the data journey of Bridgestone as an organization.

Beyer says that leadership success is dictated by three key areas — community, capabilities, and culture. 

• Community is about the people around the leader, and extends to external partners. 

• Capabilities are all about competencies and the maturity of capabilities in areas like data quality and tech-stack. 

• Culture is about building an empowering environment, a culture of inclusiveness and engagement, that celebrates the diversity of team members.

Beyer stresses that diversity is critical to the organizational mission and must include all dimensions. Unlike the traditional definition of gender and ethnicity, it also includes backgrounds, for example, business, functional, financial, and industry backgrounds. He reveals that some members who have made the greatest impact at Bridgestone have come from adjacent industries like insurance and consumer packaged goods.

From a leadership perspective, Beyer subscribes to the dual-speed approach of balancing the speed of the business and of the required outcomes. The enterprise center of expertise at Bridgestone works with a startup mentality; it is very entrepreneurial and business-centric but also balances with targets.

Beyer shares that the team is working towards an integrated architecture that flows and connects data across the organization while delivering results. The process is setting teams up to build momentum, innovate quickly, elevate proof of concepts/MVPs, learn, and iterate. 

Finally, Beyer reveals that the immediate goal is to scale the entrepreneurial spirit and extend capabilities even further to harness the power of the broader technology landscape.