A New Model for Technical Training, with Clyde Seepersad

The Untold Stories of Open Source

Clyde Seepersad is the Senior Vice President & General Manager, of the Training & Certification Project at The Linux Foundation. He carries the idea with him that failure is temporary. Knowing that can help you get through some pretty intense situations. On the flip side, knowing success is temporary gives you a chance to store away some of those good feelings, which can be used to temper the struggles as the cycle plays itself out.

"Life's a little bit like the stock market. Some days you're up, some days you're down, some days you're up big, some days you're down big. You're usually moving forward and up if you can stay focused. I say this to my team all the time. Things are going to break against you sometimes. And that's okay. Nobody's going to get taken out to the woodshed because things worked out different than what we thought.

"The important thing is we keep communicating: what did we learn? What did we do differently today than we knew yesterday. How do you build on that going forward? "

Clyde doesn’t see himself as a techie. He actually has a slide in his presentations that says “I am not a techie” and it has a giant red slash through the word ‘techie’. Looking at his background, I have to agree. In 1994 he graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting from the University of the West Indies in Barbados. As a Rhodes Scholar, he received his MBA from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, which is consistently ranked as one of the top business schools in the world. Then, in 1999, he completed his studies at the University of Oxford, receiving his Master of Science Degree in Economics for Development.