Adrian Cho

Opening and Welcome: President Cheryl Jensen

Keynote Address: Recording

With thirty years of experience as a leader in software development and over ten years as a leader in the performing arts, Adrian Cho has a unique perspective on leadership, collaboration, innovation and agility gained from managing two successful parallel careers and combining them into a third pursuit. Combining his experiences in arts and business, Adrian has developed The Jazz Process, an execution-oriented framework for collaboration, innovation, and agility that can help teams in any domain improve their performance. Come and join Adrian as he shares his ideas with us!

Biography

In the field of software Adrian Cho has led both small and large-scale, global, agile projects from concept to delivery. He is currently working at Shopify as the Director of Getting Shit Done (yes, really) where he leads a business unit helping the company accelerate and become more effective at scale by growing culture, hacking process, coaching people and teams, and building automation to reduce friction. Previously at IBM, Adrian worked on various initiatives to improve developer productivity and operational excellence in IBM’s Rational, Tivoli and Cloud business units. Adrian also has many years of experience in consulting, working on financial trading systems, banking systems, and software development tools for companies such as Fujitsu and Bankers Trust.

As a musician, Adrian is a multi-instrumentalist who performs primarily as a jazz bassist. Since 2006 he has been the Artistic Director of the Ottawa Jazz Orchestra, a unique, critically acclaimed symphonic jazz ensemble that brings together an impressive array of professional jazz and symphony musicians. His busy schedule includes weekly Saturday night gigs at Madisons New York Grill & Bar in downtown Ottawa, a full season of concerts at Canada’s National Arts Centre, and teaching at Carleton University’s Learning in Retirement program where his class in jazz history has earned high praise.

His book, The Jazz Process: Collaboration, Innovation and Agility, (Addison-Wesley, 2010) has been endorsed by a diverse collection of thought leaders. Reviewers have praised the book as “a huge payback for the time invested in reading it,” “a deep exploration of collaborative know-how,” “a concept of leadership and teamwork that’s well suited for the Google-age workplace” and “a top pick for any business collection!”

You can follow Adrian and also read his blog here.