How Culture & Strategy Keep Your Tech Company Ahead w/Gilad Berenstein

On this episode of our Strategy and Leadership Podcast, we were joined by Gilad Berenstein, the CEO and founder of Utrip.

Gilad grew up in Israel, where is dad worked as an artificial intelligence (AI) architect. This ignited his technology fascination at a young age. Gilad moved to Seattle for university and eventually started Utrip, an AI recommendation engine that is built for all aspects of the travel industry to help organize data to make trip planning more personal and enjoyable. He has taken this technology and applied it to help both tourists and businesses alike.

As the leader of a tech organization, Gilad explained how strategy development is critical for technology companies, due to the rate of change and development in the field: it’s crucial to be proactive rather than reactive. 

Throughout this episode, Gilad chatted with us about how he leads his team and strategy within his organization and shared some tips for success, including: 

• Understand who you are, what your business core is, and what you want to achieve. It’s easy to lose focus and get distracted. Remember to stay focused on your core offers and goals.
• Try an interdisciplinary approach to strategy that includes a diversity of thoughts. Include people from different areas of your organization to make the most of your meetings and to get a variety of perspectives.
• Inclusivity also helps your team feel valued and to create buy-in and trust. Fostering this type of culture can be a great long-term investment for any organization as these employees care about the organization and its success.
• When hiring, understand which parts of your culture can be taught, and which parts are values based. If you hire for values that match your culture, you can train for the other areas.
• Aligning strategy and performance can be helped by incentives, especially incentives that help employees act in the best interest of your organization (for example equity in your organization, or other long-term rewards).

Are you developing your organization's strategy? We've developed specialized tools, templates and tutorials to guide you through the entire process: