Carmen Enns (Technical Assistant at Intel)

The episode you're about to listen to was released back when the Mere Christians podcast was called the Call to Mastery. Now, if you love Mere Christians, you're still going to love these older episodes because the majority of each conversation focuses on how the gospel influences the work of our guests. With that disclaimer out of the way, please enjoy the episode.

Foreign.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I'm Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Each week I host a conversation with a Christian who's pursuing world class mastery of their craft. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits, and how the gospel of Jesus Christ influences their work. Today's guest is Carmen Inns. She's a technical assistant and chief of staff to the Vice President and CTO of the Network Platforms group at Intel. It's a crazy long title which speaks to the massive organization that Carmen is playing a role in. She's a super impressive executive who's risen quickly through the ranks and at one of the world's largest technology companies. And she's great at what she does. We sat down recently. We talked about how travel can be a vehicle for worship, why we need Christians working in large institutions and not just startups, and why silence is a crucial key to mastering any craft. Please enjoy this conversation with Carmen Enz. Hey, Carmen. Welcome to the podcast. Glad to have you here.

Thank you, Jordan. I'm excited to chat with you.

All right, so can we talk about your hobby before we talk about your day job?

Yeah.

Is that all right?

All right.

Okay.

Absolutely.

Because I think you have the best personal website domain of all time. Where into world.com did you grow up watching where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Like I did?

You know, I didn't grow up watching it. I think, you know, when computers first came out, we did have a Where in the World, like the computer game that was like, you know.

Yes, I forgot about that.

Yeah, back in the, like, Mac days. And then I did remember when that came out and they had these acapella guys talking about the where in the world. It was good. So, yeah, I definitely watched some of that.

It's arguably the best TV theme song of the 90s for sure.

Hey, I. I mean, hands down, right aware in the world.

Heal their soul in South Korea. Come on. It's terrific. So in all seriousness, though, I love the focus of your blog. It's all about, as you say, quote, sharing stories and resources to Help you unashamedly adventure while living a purposeful life that takes note of God's fingerprints. End quote. Essentially, you're saying travel can be a vehicle for worship. So I'm just curious, how have you seen God's fingerprints as you've traveled to, I don't know, something like a hundred countries now?

Yeah, yeah. And I think that's exactly it. I just love seeing how when we see different parts of the world and how people behave differently, it just shows us the glimpses. So I like seeing tribes. So for example, I was in Papua New guinea, right. And you see there's thousands of tribes in Papua New guinea. And, and just the diversity and creativity of costumes. I find that just kind of mind blowing. And then beyond that, as you're stepping into different cultures and different ways of doing things, it inevitably becomes hard as well. And so I do like the places that are hard to travel to because it provides a little bit of this kind of endurance that you come back even into your normal life and go, wow, I got through this, right? We got through some crazy roads, whatever it was, and this is nothing. You know, my, my work job. This is, this is easy. We got this, you know, so it provides a lot of perspective both in, in God's creativity and in, I guess, just the hardness of life. So I think there's like two key nuggets I love about travel.

In our dining room, we have this wall filled with crosses that we collect when we travel. Right. Every time we go somewhere, we collect across. And what I love about is they're super diverse and a lot of them really reflect the culture of the city or the country that we go to. But my kids, my three kids, especially my seven year old, my five year old, I was like, oh, where'd this cross come from? It's a great conversation starter. Just point them to the fact that people are worshiping Jesus in every corner of creation and doing it really differently. But on the new heavens of the new Earth, we're going to be able to do that with all the nations of the world, and it's going to be pretty amazing.

Absolutely.

I love that visual representation in our house. All right, let's talk about your day job. First of all, you recently moved into a new role at Intel. Talk to us about what you do at intel day in, day out.

Yeah. So, you know, I work at intel. And first of all, you know, some people, because I talk about this, where in the world, you know, they think that's CIA, but no, intel is a company that makes computer Chips that are most of our computers.

Pretty significant company.

Yeah, pretty significant, yeah. And our adage is really, you know, we create world changing technology that improves the lives of every person on the planet. And so I love that, that speaks right to the planet, that I love exploring. So what I do is right now I am a technical assistant. And so that's a specific job title that I've really only ever seen at Intel. It is basically, it's somewhat of a coveted job. It's a leadership apprenticeship really where you become a right hand co leader with a VP and basically you're managing their teams, their staff, their presentations, technical leadership pipeline and whatever they really don't have time for. But what it does importantly is it gives you a glimpse into what it's like to manage at a higher level in an organization. And I love that because I like to see how you can understand and shape that strategy with that big picture view. And so my current team, it's a lot of high level architects and fellows which are these, they're the top of the line technical contributors providing strategic direction for the company. And a lot of the areas that I've been able to work in are some of those key technology inflection points that are happening right now. So some of the things we're working, it's like moving things from our computers to the cloud, how 5G is creating data everywhere and artificial intelligence and the intelligence of the edge. So how do we get computing out to not only our computers but all the different areas? So those are some of the awesome things that I've had a chance to kind of have my hands in. And that's what I do.

I mentioned before, we've had a lot of CEOs on the podcast, but not just CEOs, we've had a lot of entrepreneurs as well who are creating new things in the world. But in all that talk, I think it can be easy to forget that it is the larger older businesses, institutions like intel, they're really having the greatest impact on the world. So I'm curious for you, like as you think about, man, I wanna change the world. Does the scale and the institutional nature of a company like intel appeal to you for that reason?

Yes, 100%. And that's, I think that is exactly why I really appreciate intel, because of that scale and that we're working with people all across the world who are really entrenched in their own economies and their own areas. And for example, I have had been on teams that were majority based in China. I have worked in China. I have been on teams that were majority based in Malaysia. I have worked on. Right now most of my team is probably more along the Indian line. So I really do appreciate the scope that intel has with the ability to change the world there. Yeah. So I guess going back a little bit, your question, how does your faith, you know, influence that pursuit? And so the two things that I would say, you know, really my faith, I guess, pursuits, it's also a little bit more of me, but it's how I see God working through, you know, my pursuit of mastery here at Intel. And one would be it's God helps me to trade fear to embrace, you know, his goodness. And you know, I'm not the most, shall we say, courageous person, but you know, all those moves, all the different people you can talk to, all that, you know, there's a level of fear there. And by embracing God and his goodness, we have that ability to kind of get over that fear. And then the other thing is, you know, it helps you endure when what it could be just monotony. And so, you know, I can definitely go into lengths on probably both of those key concepts.

No, this is really good. Go a level deeper in what you just mentioned, this endurance idea. How does your faith allow you to endure what can otherwise be a monotonous career?

At some points there's a lot of exciting things to explore and there's definitely, like I say, we need to go and explore, but at the same time, you know, once we get on a path, we do have to just put our head down and keep going. That's the only way thing I can say there. So I know I've had most recently even, you know, the last six years or so, I was in a job that I had a manager who I didn't feel really recognized. You know what I did. And I learned so much from the role. I got to do lots of different things. But you know, for me being an accomplished based person, I didn't get that recognition that I appreciate. And so there's this, okay, put your head down, continue doing the work. And you know, you pray that God will make it work out in the end. And he always does. And so I think there's this element of making sure you wait in that process and you know, look to God and it's not always fun. And you know, you might be teary in it, but what we think is distress destroying us is usually making room for other things to grow. And I like to think of like when I'm training for, you know, endurance events Putting a smile on my face while I'm, you know, out. Like, people always think I actually, it's second nature now, right. When I'm out racing, like, really hard, I'm probably smiling, like the hardest. And I don't even think about it anymore because I've just found that, you know, when you do that, like, suddenly everything becomes easier. And so now it's like second nature. And I look like it's easy when I'm probably working my hardest. Yeah.

Now this is a really good word I think is going to encourage a lot of people. I just think about all throughout Paul's letters.

Yes, Paul, yes.

This frequent command to work heartily as unto the Lord, as he says in Colossians 3.

23.

And he doesn't say work heartily if your boss recognizes your work or if, you know, your customer appreciates how hard you're working for him. It's work hardly as under the Lord, because there is a reward coming for us as we do that. So even if you don't love your job. Right. Work hardly knowing that the Lord will reward your service to your employer and to him. Right. And sometimes we'll see that on this side of eternity, sometimes we won't. But the guarantee reward is there for working hard as unto him. So, hey, I want to go back to something you mentioned before. Artificial intelligence.

Okay.

You spent a few years working on this team here at Intel. There's beginning to be a lot of talk about how the church should respond to the rise in artificial intelligence technology. I'm curious if you've dug deep into this and thought about how your face should influence your approach to this rising trend.

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. My initial foray into artificial intelligence is I had been working for a video surveillance segment. And so it's how do we get computing into. If you think of, like, in your stores, you might have video surveillance and you might want to use it for theft control and things like that. And AI becomes very helpful because now we can start tracking things like, you know, well, we can track those anomaly behaviors so we can know, you know, a theft's going to happen perhaps before it happens. And so that is super helpful. And there's a lot of ways that AI is super helpful. Like, for example, you can have on machine. On industrial controllers, right. You can find defects in the factory of products before they get out. And those defects might not be recognizable even to the eye, but we can find that with AI and machine vision.

Yeah, it's a great thing.

And in hospitals. Right. We're using AI to find, you know, much better than human eyes, say, problems we have with X rays, et cetera. And so there's a lot of really good application for AI. I guess the problem can be, for example, you know, privacy concerns. We get into some of that problem. I don't know, I guess I'm, I'm bullish. Another issue I see that some, you know, I think can run into ethics problems is AI. So what AI is, let's just make it much simpler, break it down a little bit. Instead of being, it's not some super awesome mind out there, it's basically we train a computer to know what something is, to identify things by giving it a bunch of data. So that, for example, in my case of doing defect detection, it's, we give a bunch of images of, you know, this is a defect and a bunch of images of, you know, this is good. And a computer can start understanding what's good and bad. Right. And so we can run into the problem of the data that we give to these kind of AI models might be unethical. So for example, recognizing faces, Right. And you might have all white people instead of having some Asian faces and then it's not trained for those faces and you're going to have, have some other issues. But in general, I see so much potential in the use of AI. Yeah, we did have one issue where, for example, some of the AI algorithms and equipment that was being used for AI was being used, for example, to identify Uyghur people in China. And that was a bad thing. And so we do have to deal with those kinds of issues. And so what, for example, we quickly got out of any companies that might be supplying equipment to those kind of operations. And so you have to keep an open eye to make sure that you behave in an ethical manner. But overall, I mean, I think it's super beneficial to society.

Yeah, I think so too.

Right.

And I've run tech startups that have built AI technology, so I totally get the value, but I think it's a great example. These are very powerful technologies that can be used for good and for evil. I think it's just a great reminder of why we need Christ followers in every corner of creation. Not just on the quote unquote mission field, but inside intel, asking harder questions. I think of Esther in the palace in the Bible, I think of Joseph, I think of Obadiah, who, if Obadiah wasn't there, a bunch of prophets would have been killed.

Right. Yeah.

We need faithful believers being A faith faithful presence in these places so that these big institutions could be thinking differently and more redemptively about these issues. So now I appreciate the way that you're thinking about this. I think it's really interesting. So, hey, shifting gears a little bit. I read in your bio something that we share. You're a three on the Enneagram.

Yes.

Which means that we are performers. If you're listening, don't know what that means. And because of that, and basically for those of you listening who don't know, three on the Enneagram is basically saying, like, we do things for the praise and applause of others. That's what we mean by perform. At least that's how I interpret it.

Yeah.

For me personally. And so because of that, I've struggled for a long time with finding my worth in my job titles. Right. Or in my latest professional accomplishment. I'm curious if you've struggled with this and if so, how the resources of the gospel have helped you kind of combat this.

Yeah, definitely struggle with that. And I would say it's not just that, you know, the praise well. And obviously I talked about that situation where, like, boss, you know, he didn't like giving any kind of accolades. And I'm like, this is a problem. I don't feel very good about my job and those kind of situations. You know, we have to look to God for our say, pat on the back. I think the other thing is that we can just look to other people. Right. So, you know, I have to make that shift in my head of, okay, like, where can I help develop other people and praise other people? And so I think that helps me because, you know, so much of what God is doing and Jesus is doing is that he is looking at people and, you know, pulling out. I like to think of it, the jewels that are in them. So I think of, you know, if you think of a story where the man goes in the treasure in a field and he goes, sells everything for it. And you know, that treasure in a field might be that person right in front of you. And how can we pull out those nuggets, you know, that are good in the people that we are working with and how can we bring out their potential? And so I like to kind of flip that and really, you know, help the group and the people around me make sure that they have what they need and they're able to grow.

Yeah, that's interesting. So you're using a tool like the Enneagram to better understand you and your need for praise. But turning it around and thinking about it in a way that you could bless others.

I guess a whole nother level is, as I think of it, that I'm like, oh, that's like the one thing that'll like, turn me on. And so what I love to do as I look to pull out the jewels on other people, right? So the first thing, anybody that's working for me and interns, anything, I want them to take the strength finder. It's the Gallup strength finder. Basically, it'll pull out. They have I don't know how many. It's like some 60 strengths. But I have found it to be very helpful and accurate in pulling out, say, your top three or four strengths that really make you light up. And so understanding people's strengths and where you they basically are wanting to play. And you know what it is like for me, I want that. I want that accolade and I like that future and I like to be focused and I like to arrange. And so understanding where they like to play helps me help position them where they can get what they need.

Yeah, no, I love that. I love that. So, yeah, as you know, on this podcast, we talk a lot about if we believe that our work matters to God, we should care about doing it well, we should care about doing it masterfully well. And you know the question I love to ask our guests, what does world class excellence in your field look like? You're an executive at Corporate America. What do world class executives at intel do differently in their less masterful counterparts? What does that look like in your field, Carmen?

Yeah, I think in general, like, you know, the first thing I would say is, is what I just highlighted. It's leveraging your strengths no matter what those are. And I think almost any role can be done in my role in particular, it can be done with any different mattering of, you know, strengths, as long as you're actually leveraging them, right? And so you can pull in those different pieces. Just as long as you're leveraging your strengths, it might be look very different. Now, I would call out that my strengths are what helped me be good at my job. But again, that's for me, other people, they can do the same job with a different set of strengths. And so that's where I think that's super important. But then the other piece is that you make goals. So goals super important. And especially from us, accomplishment enneagram threes. We understand that idea. But I can speak to this some more. That's actually an area where Intel, I think has fallen a little bit shy, and we're really picking up the reins there again. And then, like I talked a little bit, focusing on that people. And then the very key thing is making time to think. And so much of, you know, what I do, what a lot of managers do, is, you know, you're going from one meeting to the next to the next, and you're just doing things. And there's always something to do. There's always things to answer, always things, you know. So the biggest piece is how do you make time to think so that you can know, you know, what feedback to give so that you can know what your goal. Are you heading those goals or not? That's a key thing as well. So if I go back a little bit to some of those, when I think of so goals, I've always been super goal oriented. We make those goals. And it's one thing to make a plan to travel. It's almost easy these days. There's a lot of organization now with COVID but you can do it. But when you think of work goals, it can take a lot of time to sit and think through what is it that you really want to accomplish. And. And one of the processes that, you know, we're really working through right now is this idea of okrs. And it was brought together, you know, I think John Doerr has a book called Measure what Matters and. Yeah, yeah. And it was funny because I was, you know, on this trip biking through Italy, and one of the guys I was biking with, he's from Chile, and he's this, you know, civil engineer from Chile, and he was asking me about this book, and he's like, oh, intel uses okrs. And I'm like, what's an okr? And I've worked at Intel. Me and my husband, we both work at intel, and we're just like, what is an okr? Anyway, full swing around. We had kind of forgotten about them. And Pat is back, and we're making a good swing at making these goals. And the idea is having, you know, this key level objective and then what are those key results under there that you want to make? And it kind of waterfalls throughout the organization so that everybody is pulling towards the same. Same goals. And so I think that's definitely a key piece in there.

Yeah, we. We had a Janine uzel, the former CEO of Wikipedia, on here talking about the value of OKRs.

Awesome.

I talk about OKRs in my book Redeeming youg Time. Speaking of, I also talk a lot about the need for silence I want you to drill down a level deeper here and how this is connected to vocational mastery. Why do we need time of silence to just think, Think.

With all the things going on, we don't want to think. And you almost need much more time because then you think, even to stop and think, because it takes so long to just like, make your mind have to do something right. And so I really liked. I had read the Making of a Manager by Julie Zhang. She's a Facebook, and she. She writes this book from the perspective of somebody, you know, coming new into management. And she's an introvert. And she grew into a big team really quickly even though she was young. And so one of the key things she found, and I think this rings true for me as well, is she would have to set that block at the end of the week to simply just think through, oh, what happened this week? What was good? What feedback do I need to give people? What did not go well? And so setting that time on, say, the Friday to just think without really the agenda, I think is super important just to allow your mind to put something down on paper, see what's going on.

Yeah. I find that if I don't have my morning run, which is usually where I do a lot of my thinking, I don't listen to anything. I just run and think.

Yes.

I become really anxious and just a pretty unpleasant person because I'm distracted, because my brain is trying to make all of these creative connections that I didn't make the time to make while I was on my run. So now I'm all about that. So, Carmen, you know, I like to ask this question a lot. I'm curious what your day looks like. Typically, from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed, what's your daily routine look like?

So daily, without fail, we started the day with what we call coffee, muffin. And man.

This is so good. Yes.

Every day for the last five, few years, and without fail, we have a coffee. And my husband, like, you know, he roasts his own coffee and makes his own espresso. And so if it's all, you know, to a T, and we've had these black bean muffins with peanut butter. But what we do is we listen to Nikki Gumbel's the Bible in a year. And I really love that he does a great job there. We, year after year, we continue going through it. And that's a great app. Definitely recommend that one.

Yeah, it's great.

But the timing of that can vary between, you know, 4, 30 or 7:30, depending on, you know, workout schedules, if we're going to go out on a bike or a run or something like that. But either way, that happens first, and then, you know, we get into our work, and right now we're all working from home and so might feed my daughter, play with her a little bit, you know, get into work at lunch, we go outside, we have a salad together and work some more, you know, have some dinner. And, you know, since I guess a typical day. Yep. And I guess key in there is like to make those chunks of time to do the important things. So I do like to block off my calendar. And what I do is I like to have several calendars and they kind of overlay so that my, you know, meetings don't. I don't look busy, shall I say, with the things that I'm plotting on my calendar to accomplish separately from my meetings. Yeah.

I'm curious how as, again, not that you're not at the very top of the organization, so I think you probably think about this differently than a CEO or an entrepreneur. How do you ensure that you're fully focused on your family at the end of the workday? Like, how do you have that or do you not have a hard break between. All right, work time is done, and now I'm with my family. What does that look like for you?

You know, I think it might even be different nowadays that we're all working from home. And so I probably don't even have that hard break during the day. You know, my daughter's around, my husband's around. And I think a key thing, you know, in that my problem is I'm that endurance junkie. And so I will think I need to sit in front of my computer and do all the things. Bam, bam, bam. But it's actually, of course, much better to, you know, get up in between, do a little something here. You know, I pick up my daughter, talk with my husband, and maybe I get back to work. And so I started working in my new job. Right. I do my endurance thing, and I, you know, let's go. Let's do all the things, learn all the things. But I actually gave myself some ergo issues. And so it's key, I think, too, to be able to not just completely segregate and do the work. I think, you know, being able to juggle that has actually been really good for me.

Yeah, I can concur with that. All right. What books do you tend to recommend or gift most frequently to others? Carmen?

Probably the one book that I really Gift is. It's called the Insanity of God. And it's an insane collection of stories basically, from around the world, put together by a man who's wondering, is God enough after experiencing all these crazy places like Somalia, where God seems to have termed his face? And what I like about it is that it really speaks to what faith looks like in a variety of cultures. So unlike a lot of books that really speak to faith from a Western culture, it demonstrates, you know, how God is really powerfully working around the world.

Yeah, it's a great answer. I've never read the book, but have heard of it for years. I don't think I've ever heard that answer to that question on the podcast. So I like it. It's a good answer.

It's the one I give.

Yeah, it's good. Who do you most want to hear in this podcast talking about how their faith shapes their work?

Yeah, and I think I've told you this one. You know, it's.

Yeah, we've emailed about this. I think I know your answer.

And, you know, he'll be a hard one to get, but, you know, he definitely is my model of, you know, using faith and the excellence of work.

Yeah. Pat has been CEO of Intel. He had a couple of stints as CEO of Intel. Right.

Yeah. So when I started working at intel, he was the cto. So he's a head technology officer. And, you know, I read his book when I first started. You know, he talks about. He has a book, it's called the Juggling right now. It's called the Juggling Balancing your faith, family, and work. And, you know, he talks about how you juggle that and what that looks like and how you can create your life blueprint to kind of balance those. And so I read that when I first started at intel, and it gave me. This motivated me and my decision, I guess, to do well at Intel. And one of his goals, he outlines it in this book even, is he wants to be the CEO of Intel. But, you know, at that point, there just was not line of sight to it at all. And so he left Intel. He was a CEO of a few other companies, eventually became VMware. It was first EMC, and then he shifted into VMware and became a really great CEO there. One of the best. Best. And then just recently, just in this last year, basically was asked to come back to intel as the CEO. And, you know, he was really excited because, you know, as he outlines in that book years ago, you know, that really was his goal.

Yeah, yeah. Intel's a heck of a company with a rich history. I could see why that was his goal. We'd love to have pat on. All right, one last question. What do you want to leave our listeners with before we sign off? One thing. And again, you know this audience, an audience of Christ followers who do a lot of different things vocationally. What they share is a love of Jesus and his desire to do great work for his glory. What do you want to leave them with, Carmen?

Yeah, so I think the key thing is really, so it's second Timothy 1:7. It's for God did not give us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and of self discipline. And so I know, we know we didn't talk much about, like, all this exploring, but everything we can do, he really gives us the ability to have a purpose beyond the goal in front of you and to really have fun even in that messy middle that you might want to wallow in. But he gives you the endurance to be able to push through.

That's really good, Carmen. I want to commend you for that wisdom, for the exceptional work you do every day. Just being a faithful presence, right? God's hands and feet in corporate America and just a great reminder of the value of the ministry of excellence in the world. Guys, if you want to connect with Carmen, you can pretty easily find her on LinkedIn. And then again, her personal blog is whereindoworld.com which will of course put in the show notes. Carmen, thanks so much for hanging out with us today.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Jordan.

Hey, if you're enjoying the call to mastery, do me a favor and go leave a review of the show right now wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. I'll see you next week.