For those who've served across boundaries, what do you see as similarities and differences in leadership across countries?

In a simplistic way, the company policies normally stay the same across the continents, however, the specific country laws and culture shape the organization culture in that country.

I've got to say, it's an incredible privilege and honor to be able to share and collaborate with colleagues from all over the world. We no longer are people who are constrained to our physical location or our region, with the advent of a significant global digitization and just the convenience of international air travel. 

What was interesting about working for the city is, I certainly recognized that my focus needed to be the city of Palo Alto, but I also was in a very unique position to be a CIO in the leading birthplace of Silicon Valley. And thus, there was a lot of interest in what we were doing.

The world is fascinated with Silicon Valley, no question about it. From the smallest towns in China to the biggest cities in Europe, people want to know what we're doing here, how we're doing it, what we're succeeding with, what we're failing with. And so, on a noninterference basis, basically using my vacation time, I got to work with the most amazing cities and public officials around the world. 

There are a lot of similarities, so I'll just pick a small handful. Number one is transportation is a big problem everywhere in the world. I'm talking about things like car congestion, cars have really messed up our cities. Then we have issues with parking and pollution and accidents. I mean it's a big complicated space. Public transport isn't where it needs to be in most communities. The alternatives are very difficult. They're expensive and the change to move from everybody driving alone in the car to a viable alternative is going to be tough and it's going to take a while. 

The second one would be energy. We don't have an unlimited supply of carbon based energy. Digging stuff out of the ground and burning it is killing the planet. There is, for the first time, a global consensus on our need to rapidly move towards a non carbon based energy. And that's a common thread, but it's also unevenly distributed. Some nations are moving fast, like Norway, Germany, and even some of the Caribbean countries. America is slower, and Australia is really slow. Europe is a mixed bag. China is doing some good stuff meanwhile India has its own challenges because of the costs involved. But there is a global consensus. 

The third one would be digitalization. I think there's no doubt now as access to the internet grows and passes the 50% mark and reaches almost 60% of the world. Access to mobile devices and the internet in general is enabling governments and organizations to provide services in completely new ways, in much more convenient and lower cost ways. Those were the major similarities that I observed. 

The differences are also quite striking. One would be political systems and how you get stuff done. In the US, it's getting harder to get things done (this is a gut sense, not necessarily founded in science). What I mean by that is the system is not enabling rapid change. You could argue that there are good reasons for that, e.g. environmental considerations. There is a rigor to procurement that is healthy, but it can also be a limiting factor. There is public engagement, which I'm a big fan of, but slows down the process. If you look at some of the other systems in the world where it's top down, things just get done. That has positives, but I think we can all think of some major disadvantages of not having public engagement where big infrastructure projects are being completed. 

Number two would be available funds and partners. Not every society has the means to enact some of the changes they want to. The good news is that the cost of IT and digitalization is dropping everywhere. The barriers to entry are lower. Here in the US we are in a better place relative to the utilization of IT for providing government services. 

And then I think probably the last point in terms of differences will be where the priorities are. I'll use India as an example. India wants to build smarter cities. A few years ago the Prime Minister announced over a hundred areas that were identified as targets for being smart cities. But a little bit of the backlash was, “Okay, smart cities are important and valuable, but you know what? We don't have basic facilities for our people.” Bill Gates spends a lot of his life thinking about how we get cheaper toilets and access to hygiene for more people because it's such an important thing in terms of quality of life, containing diseases, and all sorts of things.  It's an extreme example but shows that priorities may be very different. So, when I get asked a question about what I believe to be the top of the list in terms of the best of the smart cities in the world, I ask how do we measure that? What's important for one country or one city is different from another.