There is when you think about humans engaging with machinery. That actually got me into all sorts of trouble, not least I spent a whole summer in a pig house looking at pigs giving birth to piglets and designing their crates better.

You joined Thames Water to take advantage of its leadership management development program. What was the program like?

They would literally put you in different departments, send you to different locations around the world to go solve different problems. The weekends, they would you take you away and teach you finance and team building and send you out with teams to see how you do. It was pretty rigorous, like a very active MBA, if you like.

How did you end up coming to the U.S.?

I put in for an international transfer with this software company, and I got the transfer. I remember the day the guy said, “You’ve got your transfer. Come and talk to me about it.” So I went up to the guy that was running logistics for resources and he said, “You’re going to Cleveland, Ohio.” I’m like, “Where? There’s a Cleveland in Ohio?” My only other experience with the States to that point was I did a study abroad, and I was in Santa Barbara. My imagery of the U.S. was Santa Barbara, not Cleveland, Ohio.

What made you take the job at ­Circleback?

I was taken both by the passion and the quality of the people, and then what they had already built and figured out. I guess the third leg of that story, I’d experienced this problem. I’d been on the other side many times as head of sales and head of marketing. I’d bought data to try and fix databases. I had tried to get sales people to do prospecting better. I had got frustrated by the quality of the corporate data that we have around our contacts and many different versions of that. I’d seen so much associated pain with the problem they were trying to solve. I get this problem. So I knew the market demand from the other side, and I have never heard of anyone going after it this way and then you couple that to a big data play, which is obviously so topical right now. This to me seems like a perfect fit.

What do you hope to achieve?

The job is to commercialize the technology. They’ve spent a good two years tackling the technology and the problem, and so it comes down to little old me. We’ve built this wonderful stuff. Now you go sell it, you go market this thing.

What’s the most difficult lesson you’ve had to learn during your career?

I doubt there’s one. Maybe I can answer it in this way. I can tell you the thing that I wish I’d known a lot earlier. I was always a hard worker, but there’s a difference between working hard and being really committed to work. And that discipline of when you want to stop and not letting yourself stop, and figuring out how to keep going forward and recharging yourself along the way. I wish I’d known how to do that when I was younger. It’s an intensity of work rather than hard work, and know that you’re focusing on the right thing at the right time, and go at it at a pace you have to go at.

What’s the best advice you’ve received in your career?

Don’t be rash ... but be swift. You just can’t spend time analyzing to the Nth degree. Knowing what good enough looks like. I’ve had mentors who have said, “This is way too perfect and you’re spending way too much time on this thing and you’ve just got to move.” And other times in my career, I would shoot from the hip and ask questions later and that was completely the wrong way to go do it. Recognizing that there’s always a middle ground.

— Interview with Kathy Orton

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