Roger Joys discovered his love for technology in high school, programming handheld calculators and designing simple logic circuits. He launched his career in early PCs and mainframe systems, rode the dot-com tsunami, and embraced cloud, AI, and other innovations driving our digital society. “As a lifelong learner, I could not have asked for a better career,” Roger says.
Since 2015, Roger has worked for GCI, a 40-year-old telecom company bringing internet, mobile, and video services to 200 Alaskan communities, some among the most remote in the U.S. The network runs on satellite, fiber optics, and microwave technologies connecting Alaska to the lower 48 states and the world. For the past five years, he has served as GCI’s Vice President of Enterprise Cloud Platform.
“Our goal is to connect all Alaskans [to the services they want and need],” Roger says, noting, we bring healthcare and education to the villages and close the digital divide, to improve Alaskans’ lives.”
Roger’s approach focuses on “people, process, and products.” He says, “[I’m] not the smartest technical person in the room, but the best cat herder to get everybody aligned, motivated, and enthusiastic about change.”
With the telecommunications landscape rapidly evolving and GCI facing new competition, Roger wanted a fresh perspective on transforming organizational culture for growth and success. He joined Stanford Graduate School of Business Executive Education’s Culture as a Competitive Advantage program to gain new knowledge and skills to set up his teams for success.
Learning New Ways to Build Company Culture
Roger notes that traditional companies like his can become “entrenched in old-school thinking and approaches” that get in the way of innovation and opportunity. He felt he needed new ideas to create a positive culture that supports teams, better serves customers, and achieves company-wide transformation.
He was drawn to the one-week, in-person program based on past Stanford experience. “Culture as a Competitive Advantage was right up my alley,” says Roger, who had just completed Stanford GSB’s New Ventures in Established Organizations program. “While a tech strategy is important, it’s only one-half of the equation for success. Culture is equally important. I needed to learn how to innovate how we handled people. That was no short order. I wanted to return to the Stanford campus.”
The curriculum provides a roadmap to demystify culture and build a resilient, adaptable, high-performing organization — offering participants cutting-edge insights on trending challenges like hybrid work and AI from experts. Roger says the case studies analyzing challenges and change at well-known companies, including those from big tech and other industries, resonated with his own experiences.
“Stanford has great professors teaching great materials with a wealth of case studies,” Roger says, noting the program brings in some of the same executives featured in the case studies themselves. “Hearing business leaders talk firsthand about their experiences, rather than just reading papers, was extremely beneficial.”
Roger feels that “change at tech companies can be scary.” The program offered him techniques to “instill excitement about new opportunities rather than fear of job loss. I gained insights to help teams better walk through organizational restructuring, framing it as an opportunity rather than a disruption that causes anxiety.” He says the program offered simple ways to “make incremental improvements and get the ship pointed north,” rather than tackling problems from a “must fix all” mentality.
Learning with tech and other industry leaders was “icing on the cake,” Roger shares. “I enjoyed the diversity of discussions beyond my own industry. My cohort’s willingness to engage each other, during and in between sessions, was extremely beneficial. I couldn’t have asked for a better set of classmates.”
Leading Teams through Transformational Change
Roger says he emerged from the program with “renewed energy and new ideas” to improve company culture in incremental ways, in support of transformational change. “I’m taking my learnings to look at new ways to address restructuring, putting company culture at the highest level,” he says. “Making GCI an even better place to work makes us more successful as a company to help us continue to innovate and achieve our goals.”
To other business leaders interested in putting their people first and improving company culture, Roger offers this advice: “The time and dollars you invest will pay you back a hundredfold in terms of impact on your people, your product, and your company. With a great culture, pretty much anything is possible.”
Interested in learning more about this program?
Explore the Culture as a Competitive Advantage program details, curriculum, schedule, and more.
