Season 10, Episode 3 - Kira Barclay, CEO and founder of Black Antler Advisory & Consulting

·30 min·2 clips

I was the first person with a graduate quantitative degree hired in that area.

Kira Barclay comes in through a career timeline. Bill Franks starts with their analytics program connection, then sets her work at Black Antler Advisory and Consulting against her long chapter at John Deere. It is a career conversation, but it does not stay tidy or abstract. The episode follows her move through technical work, bigger leadership roles, and consulting to show how analytics careers can widen over time. Energy gets its due, but so does pushback. Bill presents Kira as someone who brings enthusiasm into a room and still challenges the thinking in it. Her leadership view is plainspoken: the job was always about helping people succeed, even when the job itself changed. Early on, that could mean sitting with someone on a problem, including pairing on code, because the work was still close. Later, with hundreds of people involved, helping looked different. It meant finding the blockers, the awkward process knots, and the corporate absurdities that stop useful work from moving. Kira jokes about the Dilbert-cartoon side of big companies, but the joke has teeth. Those situations waste real time. The episode keeps circling back to a grounded idea: technical credibility matters, but leadership is often about making teams effective inside actual institutions. Near the end, Kira turns to model consequences. Companies need people who understand the systems and the human fallout when those systems behave in unexpected ways. The best analytics person here is not only the one who builds the model, but the one who helps the company deal with what the model creates.

As heard by us

A grounded look at analytics leadership, more practical than technical.

The episode is less about the technical climb than about what comes after it: how a data leader learns to build teams, clear roadblocks, and keep analytics tied to real work.

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Why you'd press play

You want a candid look at how analytics leadership scales from one person to hundreds.

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