Tom Scott is the CEO of Wrike, the work management platform trusted by over 20,000 customers including Walmart Canada and Sony Pictures Television, across more than 140 countries and nearly 2 million end users.
Tom's path to the CEO seat is anything but conventional. He spent over 20 years leading finance and operations across some of the most hardware-intensive sectors in tech, from building cell towers to running finance at Zebra Technologies and autonomous robotics company Fetch Robotics, before joining Wrike as CFO and transitioning to CEO in July 2023.
In this episode, Tom draws on that rare vantage point (having led through multiple waves of technological disruption) to make a case that the leaders and companies that treat organizational intelligence as a combination of human judgment and AI capability, rather than a replacement of one by the other, are the ones building something that lasts.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why transformation remains stubbornly hard in the AI era, and what leaders consistently underestimate about the real blockers to change
Why the biggest career risk today is not AI itself, but the decision to stop moving up the value stack of your current role
The two words Tom's customers and team use most to describe the current moment: pace and noise, and what that means for leaders trying to drive transformation.
How Tom coaches his leadership team to hire for intensity and ownership over domain expertise, and why that philosophy matters more now than ever
Why a deterministic career plan is no longer a viable strategy, and what curiosity and experience-chasing actually look like as professional operating principles
What Tom believes will be table stakes in the workplace well before 2031, and why the building blocks are already visible today
Explore this conversation:
00:00 Intro and Fun Fact
04:08 Scaling Work Management with Tom Scott, CEO of Wrike
04:47 From Cell Towers to the CEO Seat at Wrike
05:51 How Wrike Helps Teams Connect and Accelerate Work
10:21 The Hardest Part of Transitioning to the CEO Role
14:13 Wrike's Origins: Building Scalability for Complex Workflows
17:04 Managing Pace and Noise During AI Transformations
21:20 Why True Organizational Intelligence Requires Human Judgment
25:54 Embracing Technology to Move Up the Value Stack
28:11 Why Curiosity Outweighs a Deterministic Career Plan
31:25 Hiring Empowered Teams: Selecting for Ownership and Intensity
34:31 The Future of Work: When Agentic AI Becomes Table Stakes
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