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Ep. 59: Gabriella Vacca - International Executive in Telco and Streaming - Movement Is Life
What must change when your team becomes too large to know everyone by name. Gabriella Vacca and I studied computer engineering together in Turin, where she was the more dedicated student, and she built an international career: Olivetti, Omnitel, Bouygues Telecom, Cingular and AT&T, ESPN Mobile, Gogo, ten years at Comcast and five years as CTO of Sky Italia until last July 2025. She left Italy with two suitcases and a plan to be home within a year and, thirty years later, she is based in Philadelphia leading a strategic advisory portfolio.The spine of the episode is that leading 200 people and leading 2,000 are two very different jobs, and the second one only works if you design the organization intentionally, with clear purpose. Values become infrastructure. When your organization has fewer than roughly 300 people, you know everyone, and the why can travel through you. As she put it, "it is easier to inspire your team with the why, rather than only the what and the how." Above that size, the why must be built into the organization. She uses the Gartner pyramid, adding a foundational values layer underneath and KPIs that serve both the tech org and the business.Transparency, defined properly, does not mean handing the business every report you produce. . That level of detail is too specific to be meaningful outside the organization. Her analogy is a visit to the doctor: do you need someone simply to read your lab scores; you need interpretation, empathy and a clear explanation of what the scores mean. Are you fine? Can you improve? Is there something serious to worry about? She put that value to the test in a meeting with lawyers present, when her own team admitted that it had chosen not to disclose a data point. She stopped the meeting and told the business stakeholders: "Please forgive for failing to uphold our commitment to transparency." A value becomes real the first time defending it publicly costs you something.Crossing the forest. Intended change is like crossing a forest you have never entered before, without survival training. You keep the destination in sight, bring the right equipment, surround yourself with people who have skills you do not have, act with humility, and clearly say what you know and what you do not. Knowing your own limits becomes part of the operation you lead. She needs seven hours of sleep, and during COVID at Comcast, while moving call centres and thousands of people to remote work, that fact shaped the plan: work shifts from day one and a designated backup for every team member, including herself, to keep operations running 24/7 if anyone became unavailable.“Live operations” (or ON SCREEN?) changes the discipline. In media, "the damage is already done. It's real time. You are on screen." At Sky that meant tracking near-miss KPIs, because once a failure has occurred, it can’t be undone; the near misses help prevent the next one. The 92% conversation. Growing up near Turin meant being measured against the best of the best, and learning that risk is personal, so failure feels personal too. Moving to the States rewrote that mindset into four words: "Movement is life. Movement is learning." Take calculated risk, and learn to be satisfied with 90% or 92%, because investing 100% of your energy on a single destination leaves every other opportunity unexplored.A swimmer, not a diver. She can dive deep when needed but doing so costs her the broader view. The role of a senior job is to make sense of complexity so other leaders can make sound decisions, including recognizing when the right technology decision is the wrong decision for the company.The reality of women at work. Gabriella hosts a nine-episode series of that name on the EveCareers Podcast Network. She defines luck as readiness plus opportunity plus the ability to say yes. Her view on where women stand in the workplace is shaped by two factors: the company culture and what each individual is willing to do within it. .
