Andy Chen spent 30 years inside Ontario Power Generation, Canada's largest electricity producer — starting as a trainee and retiring as Chief Technology Officer. Along the way he led the first successful replacement of obsolete direct-control computers at a nuclear station, a first for the entire industry, and helped prepare the plant through the Y2K transition. He later served as President of IEEE TEMS (2020–2021), led the IEEE Systems Council through its growth from 20 to 25 member societies, and co-founded REDDS Capital — a venture fund built with three billionaire partners to bet on unproven, disruptive technology.

In this episode, host Madhusudan Bangalore Nagaraja sits down with Andy for a wide-ranging conversation on what three decades in the highest-stakes engineering environment there is taught him about making decisions when the cost of being wrong is either catastrophic or just expensive.

They cover:

— Why ”risk is easy to mitigate but hard to escape” — and why the word that matters in that sentence is mitigate, not escape
— The billboard image that shaped Andy's entire decision-making philosophy, and why he refuses to make a decision with only one option on the table
— Inside the first-ever replacement of a nuclear station's direct-control computers — and the ”defense in depth” design principle the industry adopted after Fukushima's flooding failure exposed a blind spot no one had designed for
— Why speed matters more than people think: the 30-second difference between a small fire and a big fire, and why solving a problem today keeps it smaller than solving it tomorrow
— The one due-diligence question Andy asks before funding any startup — not ”what's the technology,” but ”who's on the team,” and why he'd rather back people with grit than people who've never failed
— What a $10,000 360-degree leadership assessment revealed about his own biggest blind spot — and the one-sentence verdict his wife delivered for free
— The single action Andy wants every leader listening to take this week: treat every interaction, however brief, as a chance to leave someone better off than you found them

Connect with Andy Chen:
 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chenatl/
 REDDS Capital: reddscapital.com/investors/andy-chen/
 IEEE Systems Council: ieeesystemscouncil.org/contact/andy-chen

Connect with your host Madhusudan Bangalore Nagaraja:
 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/madhusudannagaraja/
 IEEE Senior Member, Technical Delivery Manager, eSystems Inc. | PMI Infinity Advisory Committee | Irving, Texas, USA

IEEE TEMS Radio — Engaging Conversations in Education, Engineering, Management and Technology.

Produced by: IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society
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