***A recurring series to spotlight the leaders who are shaping the Future of Work through the lens of data. Today’s profile features Joseph Duva, transformation and business execution leader and the current Head of Corporate Strategy at Iron Mountain**

 

Joe, welcome to the series! I’m really excited to sit down and chat with you! To begin, I always like to dive into our guests’ career and background. Do you mind sharing with our readers how you got into the world of strategy and the intersection of your work over the years?

Joseph Duva

Joseph Duva: Happy to be here! I started my career at Citibank where I was responsible for a couple of different things around strategy and product development. From there, I moved on to a consulting firm called Mercer where I was responsible for strategy, corporate development, and innovation. While at Mercer, I was fortunate to be able to launch their first ever Innovation Hub, which focused on developing cutting edge products and business solutions to help leaders more powerfully infuse data, analytics, and big tech into their lines of business.

That focus eventually led me to IBM — which was fresh off the Watson win in Jeopardy — and so it was a really exciting time to join. I spent some time in their corporate strategy team and then after that did a bit of sales channel and partner development work. IBM really taught me a new set of skills, sharp business acumen, and the ability to build global leadership experience.

From there, I ended up taking a bit of a turn. I had always wanted to get some startup experience and an opportunity to join Instacart pre-IPO came up where I got to work as Chief of Staff for their Chief Business Officer and then eventually Head of Partner Success post-IPO. It was a great experience. Most recently, I came to Iron Mountain when an old boss who was an incredible mentor my entire career asked me to join to help build-out their Corporate Strategy function.

 

Wow, that’s an incredible career journey to date with so many opportunities to build and create new. When you think about chief motivators that have shaped your career decisions, what comes to mind?

JD: Throughout my career I’ve essentially bounced between strategy, product development, and innovation. I love learning, solving new challenges, and tackling challenges where there’s a lot of ambiguity or a lot at stake. Roles that are high visibility, high pressure, and present the ability to be accountable. That pressure drives me. My WHY has always been focused on solving those big problems for organizations and building new things, and luckily I’ve been able to do that throughout my entire career, which has been amazing.

 

When you describe your passion for tackling ambiguity that really sticks out to me, particularly as leaders seem to be navigating today a never-ending cycle of ambiguity and macro shifts. And yet at the same time, our ability to accelerate to next has never been greater. What advice would you offer to leaders as we navigate this critical time?

JD: Yeah, it’s interesting because fear and ambiguity have always existed in different shapes and flavors since I started working. I remember when I first came onto the scene, it was just about being able to sort through the confusion to be able to organize data better. Then once we mastered that, we had to navigate the explosion of the volume, variety, velocity of data which was about the time the phrase “big data” was coined with everybody trying to figure it out. And now we’re entering the AI era, and while we’re in very early innings, we’re focused on how to generate new stuff out of the data, automate with agentic AI, and those sorts of things. So while the questions have morphed, the ambiguity is always there, which causes fear – and fear is a good thing. It can be leveraged as a driver.

I think the advice I would give to leaders who are navigating times of ambiguity is that while a lot of companies will sit on the sidelines, scratch their head, and wait for everybody else to do something before they start to poke around, you can be the one who starts playing around, being agile, being nimble, getting out there, meeting the companies that are building the future, and helping redefine or define the future of your business in small bite-sized chunks. That’s always been important but with the rate and pace of change now, it’s never been more important.

 

Speaking of leaning into new and emerging capability, I’d love to know more about your role as Head of Corporate Strategy at Iron Mountain, as well as the role that data and analytics plays in your day-to-day.

JD: Data and analytics is not an option anymore. People used to say (and still sometimes say) there are tech companies and non-tech companies, but everybody is a tech company now and inherent in being a tech company is the need to also be a data and analytics company. Everybody is doing some sort of data and analytics initiatives in-house and usually at pretty big scale now. And we are no different at Iron Mountain.

When it comes to Strategy roles and teams, everything we do connects to that mission of taking the guessing, intuition and potentially inefficient decision making out of the equation and to make data the solution. Our job is to surface data objectively and then draw solid insights from that data to make as unbiased of decisions as we possibly can. In our function, some of the core things we do involve things like market intelligence, or understanding size of markets, how markets are moving, who key competitors are; performing M&A due diligence, looking at financial data and financial performance of potential acquisition targets; providing innovation support and business case building; strategy definition, or taking data from a number of different type of sources to figure out what a good growth trajectory or plan could look like for different business units… and that’s just naming a few core areas.

 

Data clearly plays a central role in shaping your remit and charter, and through this series we’re hoping to shed a light on the many ways leaders can win with data. What’s a story that comes to mind for you when you think of a time that you won with data?

JD: In our innovation space at Iron Mountain, we are constantly evaluating new opportunities. Recently, we had a new product opportunity that kind of ‘fell into our lap’. We realized we were doing something that was interesting for ourselves and started asking, “Is there a market for this? What could that market look like? Would we be willing to invest to make this something we sell to clients?” Once we defined the value proposition, there was a lot of upfront work we had to do to understand target clients, gains and potential savings for their business, pricing models, potential growth curves, and so on. Then we had to build a business case based on all that data to understand the overall opportunity and how to make it work at scale. It made sense and so we have soft launched it.

For a long time, I think there were a lot of people who were afraid and viewed data as a dirty word because people weren’t comfortable with it and didn’t feel like they had the skills to unlock insight from data. And so they would be exposed if they got too close to it so they made it somebody else’s job or said it was too complicated. But I think we’ve rounded that curve. Particularly with AI. I’m seeing a trend now of more people are doing more types of analysis on more types of data because they have tools now via AI that just make it much easier. I think as a whole people are getting more adept at using data and analytics in their day-to-day function or day-to-day role.

 

That’s really well said, and I know a lot of people will relate to having at some point felt too afraid to get stated with data for fear of being exposed. For a while, folks could get by but, as you shared earlier, the macro is shifting far too fast. Today, every leader is a data leader, regardless of title or function. Staying here, and knowing that innovation is such a passion of yours, I’d love to know how you define the term “data innovation?”

JD: Wow, we could probably spend a full day on the innovation topic! But I think for us innovation is really about building a bold vision for the long term. So instead of looking at the next two to three years and asking what’s going to drive growth for the company, focusing on what’s going to drive step change impact. We’re thinking about the bolder, longer term strategic bets that we’re going to make to chart the next course of growth for the company over the next decade plus to come. And within that, you can’t separate data from innovation and innovation from data.

Innovation drives the need for better data to get better insights to make those decisions be the right ones, because there’s a lot of things we can go do so it’s about narrowing down that massive list to a couple of things that we’re going to bet a lot of time and money on. So to get a senior leadership team on board to make those commitments, you have to have really rock solid logic and that logic has to be based on really great data and insights.

Data innovation for us is also about the tools piece. In the next few years, we’re going to see some incredible change that we don’t even see coming yet that is going to make the ability to drive better insights and make better business decisions a part of everybody’s job, and it’s going to be something that happens quickly and without as much debate, argument, and inefficiency.

 

OK, final question… when you think about the data and analytics front and don your futures cap, what are you most excited about when it comes to what you see coming?

JD: There’s a lot of excitement about Gen AI but also a lot of fear and worry so there are a couple of things that I would put as thought starters to other leaders about where we are in the AI growth curve. One thing I would flag as we continue on this journey is to make sure you understand the source of the large language model data — what’s going in, what’s being kept out, who is pushing it, what are their motives, biases, that sort of stuff — because that will obviously impact the outputs, the decisions you make based on them and ultimately, your business performance and impact on your customers.

That said, I do feel that that Gen AI is super exciting because it’s using data to create new things. I first saw the power of that when I was at Instacart with our ability to create recipes and bring the combination of different foods to life to change the day-to-day for families around the dinner table. And I see it now with at Iron Mountain where we are fully embracing it with an AI Center of Excellence (CoE) and dedicated leadership around it.

And then I think about the next evolution of that and seeing agentic AI come to life in a meaningful way where we can actually automate or turn over decisions and processes to computers and know that they will handle it with a high degree of accuracy and even empathy in some cases. That’s mind blowing and I think that’s going to wildly change the economics of the entire business landscape.

 

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