“I didn’t take any computer courses in high school but got hooked on computer science at the University of Toronto. Computer science was all about solving problems and I loved it!” -Samuel Chiang
[00:00:15] Samuel Chiang: When I was probably 11, maybe 12 years old, I told my grandfather I wanted to be like him. He was a lawyer, and he immigrated to Canada after us.
And he was a specialist in the Canadian government when he arrived in Canada, because he knew Chinese law. When I said to him, I want to be like you, he said to me, your English must be impeccable. And I said, okay. He said, but I wouldn’t want you to practice as a defense lawyer.
I said, why? He didn’t answer the question right away. He said, you may want to be a corporate lawyer. That always stuck with me. And then he said, you don’t want to be a defense lawyer because sometimes you could be defending somebody, and then in the midst of a trial, they confess to you everything.
[00:01:16] Samuel Chiang: And you’re stuck. He said, it’s very painful to handle that type of thing in the midst of a trial.
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[00:01:24] Tommy Thomas: Our guest today is Samuel Chiang. Samuel has a diverse and accomplished background that significantly influenced his leadership. He was born in Taiwan and later moved to Canada where he grew up and began his professional career. He graduated from the University of Toronto when he began his career at Ernst & Young in Canada.
In addition to Ernst & Young, Samuel has served in senior leadership roles with The International Orality Network, Trans World Radio and Partners International. He also served as the president and CEO of The Seed Company, a Bible translation organization within the Wycliffe family. Under his leadership, the organization focused on making scriptures available in oral and written forms for unreached and Bibleless peoples. Along the way he gained a great appreciation for using technology in the workplace. And he pioneered the use of AI in both the private and non-profit sectors. He and his wife Robbi make their home in the Dallas Metroplex.
Let’s pick up on the conversation with Samuel Chiang.
[00:02:46] Tommy Thomas: What’s your happiest memory of childhood?
[00:02:51] Samuel Chiang: Yeah, it depends on which segment. I remember, in my early teens, playing my violin. Whether it was solo, whether it was ensemble, whether it was orchestral, that was very special, that I remembered. I remember playing tennis, teaming together in tennis.
[00:03:11] Samuel Chiang: It was great. You might not know this about me, I’m a five-time immigrant, and so my immigrant experience, even when I was younger, first arrived from Taiwan to Canada, everything was new. That was a wonderful memory.
[00:03:28] Tommy Thomas: At what age did y’all come to Canada?
[00:03:31] Samuel Chiang: I was a little bit over 10 years old. And, so everything was new, yeah, all the senses were new. I only had the alphabet and seven phrases of courteous language, thank you, excuse me, will you please, those types of languages. And that’s how I started in Canada.
[00:03:54] Tommy Thomas: Do you remember how long it took you to get reasonably fluent in English?
[00:04:01] Samuel Chiang: Oh, my goodness, it was quite a long time. Let’s just say, you’re grade five, grade six, grade five, in Canada. Probably I did not become fluent until I was nearly 16.
[00:04:15] Tommy Thomas: Wow. So, what’s the greatest gift that your parents gave you?
[00:04:24] Samuel Chiang: I think immigrating to Canada. They’re both Christians. They said to us, we don’t want you to be conscripted into the military in Taiwan. And so, we want to give you and your brother a chance to experience things very differently. And I believe the gift of Canada in that immigration and the growth in that environment was the greatest gift my parents gave to us.
[00:04:55] Tommy Thomas: What was high school like in Canada?
[00:05:00] Samuel Chiang: I went to a high school that was 66 percent Jewish. And I knew the sons and daughters of literally captains of industries. And I watched how they grew up in a very unique setting. Jewish people, by and large, love the arts, are great contributors to society as a whole, from history to research, etc.
And when they love the arts, their sons and daughters are top in their forms in terms of music, et cetera. So it was, they pulled me along. I was a learner. I thought I was good at playing my violin, but these other students were even better than I am. And they pulled me along.
[00:05:45] Tommy Thomas: You decided to go to university. Did you consider a lot of colleges and universities, or did you pick one and say, I’m going there?
[00:05:55] Samuel Chiang: My goodness. in Canada, it’s interesting in Canada, you get to pick three. I did. And then it was ultimately my parents saying to me, if you went to this university and lived at home, we’ll pay for everything.
I accepted that and actually stayed home and went to University of Toronto, and studied economics and finance and accounting and it was good. It was good to be in Toronto.
[00:06:23] Tommy Thomas: How did you get into the econ and finance and accounting field? Did you know somebody that had been a CPA or an economist?
[00:06:32] Samuel Chiang: No, numbers were always of interest to me. And, let me rewind the conversation a little bit, for myself. When I was probably 11, maybe 12 years old, I told my grandfather I wanted to be like him. He was a lawyer, and he immigrated to Canada after us.
And he was a specialist in the Canadian government, when he arrived in Canada, because he knew Chinese law and when I said to him, I want to be like you, he said to me, your English must be impeccable. And I said, okay, he said, but I wouldn’t want you to practice as a defense lawyer.
I said, why? He didn’t answer the question right away. He said, you may want to be a corporate lawyer. That always stuck with me. And then he said, you don’t want to be a defense lawyer because sometimes you could be defending somebody, and then in the midst of a trial, they confess to you everything.
[00:07:42] Samuel Chiang: And you’re stuck. He said, it’s very painful to handle that type of thing in the midst of a trial. And I listened to that. And so, I thought, do I want to be a corporate lawyer? But reading was not my strong suit. Not yet at that time. And then I love numbers. And so, that’s the way I went into accounting, finance and economics.
[00:08:12] Tommy Thomas: So, what was your favorite part of college?
[00:08:21] Samuel Chiang: At University of Toronto, there were two things. One was in social sciences, sociology, and then the other one was actually computer science which surprised me because in high school, I never took computer science, but at University of Toronto, at that time still had to use those card decks where you punch holes and all that, and we used that to solve problems. That was solving problems and I loved it.
[00:08:50] Tommy Thomas: You and I would be from that age. Yes. We took Fortran and COBOL, and we had those big, big boxes of cards. And, yes, I remember those days. What is something that people are always surprised to find out about you?
[00:09:13] Samuel Chiang: They would say to me, even most recently, they would say, oh, you speak English so well. I don’t know what to say about that. That’s a surprising thing. Actually, the world over, I have had people saying that to me.
[00:09:30] Tommy Thomas: Think back to your first management job when you actually had some people that you were responsible for. What do you remember about that?
[00:09:40] Samuel Chiang: Yeah, I remember very specifically at Ernst & Young that even when I have people reporting to me, even though I was maybe really green in my experiences, people were just very respectful. They were very accepting and very professional.
[00:09:58] Samuel Chiang: That just made me feel like they were helping me to do what I needed to do. And even though I might not even have much experience in doing any supervision, I always remember the way that people accepted me. They were very professional, very respectful.
[00:10:21] Tommy Thomas: Each of us probably has times in our life where in the South, we would say our metal has been tested. I’m not sure what the Canadian equivalent with that, or the Chinese equivalent for that would be, but have you had times in your life when your metal was tested? And if so, how did you come out of it?
[00:10:39] Samuel Chiang: Yeah, so very specifically, I remember in high school, in one of the violin pieces in the ensemble, I worked hard to get the lead part in that ensemble, very specifically for a competition. I didn’t get it. Another student who was a great younger got it.
And yeah, my heart was crushed. But that was one of those sorts of moments. I had to really console myself to say, okay, this is the Bach triple violin concerto. So, there are three leads. I got none of those, but I’m still the lead for the entire ensemble. And that’s a role to play.
So, I better play it well. And so that was the first time. The second time was, that I recall very specifically, was in an organization. On the one hand, being interviewed to be the CEO of the organization. On the other hand, I had a whole group of people complaining about me and they were doing an examination about my ministry practices and procedures and all that stuff.
[00:12:02] Samuel Chiang: And, I remember during the interview that the board chair said, I just hope that examination piece will go away soon so that we can interview you properly. As it turns out, that examination piece did not go away anytime soon. It took nine months, but it was great. It was a wonderful experience with the Lord.
I would never trade it for anything else. Because I was in that situation, they decided not to interview me further for the candidacy of CEO for that organization. That was crushing, but between the two, I would never trade the experience with the Lord going deep with him, and don’t even want to come out of the water, if you will, we’re out of the ocean, if you will, and just want to stay longer.
So that’s a heart matter that was very deep within me.
[00:13:06] Tommy Thomas: You’ve built a lot of organizations over the years, been CEO, founded companies. Let’s talk about hiring for a minute. When you’re hiring at the cabinet level in general, what are you looking for?
[00:13:18] Samuel Chiang: At the cabinet level, the C level, I often look for their EQ, the emotional quotient, that’s pretty important to me, their character, their culture.
And then their competency, character and culture. Those are non-negotiables competencies, you could throw that where you could delegate some of it away, but their emotional quotient, their culture, their character.
[00:13:50] Tommy Thomas: What’s your favorite or most effective interview question?
[00:13:57] Samuel Chiang: Yeah, I think we might even start around the same place. Tell me a little bit about your childhood. I would love to hear the friends and the friendships and the relationships that you have had. And then I also ask often, tell me a little bit about how you left home for your work, for your college, for your university.
[00:14:23] Tommy Thomas: Wow. That is a penetrating question. Yeah. How you left home. Yeah, one of my recent podcast guests said that one of the things she wished that she learned earlier was how to terminate somebody with grace and dignity. What have you learned about terminating people when it’s just not working out?
[00:14:52] Samuel Chiang: My biggest piece about termination is, I have to be very clear. I have to tell myself not to pass on any problems further. Oftentimes you terminate because people handed it to you. And, with grace and all that be very clear, keep the dignity of the individual, offer ways to consider rescaling, or in some cases offer them the possibility for HR to help them to look for their next assignment.
[00:15:28] Samuel Chiang: Those are some of the things that I have practiced and have practiced consistently. The clarity is very important for people.
[00:15:43] Tommy Thomas: You’ve been president of The Seed Company and other organizations but take us into that presidency. How did you get there? What was it like when you got there?
[00:15:57] Samuel Chiang: Oh, wow. Yeah. I have served on the board of The Seed Company.
And I learned a lot. And then I remember, it’s a long story. I’ll keep it short. I was invited to come off the board to apply and I did. And it was the summer of 2014. And during that time, I wasn’t quite sure I was supposed to apply, even though I’d been invited. So, I prayed, and it was during the time that the summer of 2014 was, the Ebola crisis in West Africa.
I was actually in West Africa at the time, and the Lord met me, twice. Nothing audible, but it was a sense of understanding from the Lord. And because of those two understandings, very deep, very unique moments. It was almost like he was having inner conversations with me. It was out of that experience that I put myself forward.
[00:17:08] Samuel Chiang: And then I also asked the Lord, I said, I need to know that I have a specific assignment within The Seed Company or Bible translation as a whole. And he did, he put on my heart the need for the Old Testament very specifically. So, it was through that and ultimately, the visa process that came into this country, in the United States on a O-1 visa.
And then, when I was pointed into the role and started, the board was ever so kind to provide an onboarding coach. That was marvelous in the sense that I lived overseas, working in Hong Kong for 25 years, coming into the United States. I discovered much later; I have multiple massive gaps.
And the board was so kind to bring along onboarding coaching and subsequent coaches for me to bridge the gap and understand things. And so that was wonderful in the role. It was challenging. It was knee driven every day, asking God for things that I’ve never asked before, and then watching and understanding God’s leading in that.
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[00:18:29] Tommy Thomas: Now, I probably don’t know all the, know the whole, how to explain that, but my understanding was that The Seed Company was, at least at one level, a way of shortening the Bible translation process from the classical Wycliffe M.O. Is that correct? Is that more or less, right? Yes. So you, if you’re operating there, I’m assuming you had some pushback from people that had been in the field translating the classical way for many years.
How did y’all resolve that and realize that those two things could probably peacefully coexist?
[00:19:07] Samuel Chiang: Yeah, I think I’ll answer that on multiple levels. One level is for the desire of people receiving the scripture sooner rather than later. Everyone, it’s almost a justice issue, isn’t it?
Everybody has a right to the scripture, and will they receive it sooner rather than later? So that is the DNA within and then the indigenous model, which The Seed Company was founded upon, of the indigenous church doing the translation of the Word. That’s a little bit different and we need both.
[00:19:49] Samuel Chiang: We absolutely need both of the people who have been called. But the calling of the missionary and the calling of the indigenous translator, they’re the same call to serve God, and in a very specific field, Bible translation. And so, we need both. Coexistence doesn’t always come easy, even today. I’m still involved in Bible translation in other organizations.
And even today, it’s still not easy. Even with church-based translation, and even with artificial intelligence, that friction continues and the friction that continues, it’s really a sense of working it out relationally, horizontally, and then vertically with God. What is God’s desire in all of this?
So, man’s side of holding on to the tension is always very interesting.
[00:20:57] Tommy Thomas: A pastor on the East Coast once told me, see if I remember this right, he said the most difficult thing in the world is living in the center of the tension of God’s will.
[00:21:07] Samuel Chiang: Oh, my goodness, it really is.
And then in Bible translation, it’s not only living in the center of God’s will, but the desire to have quality assurance, really super wonderful, clear, natural language of the translation, so that the community as a whole will say that is God’s Word for me.
[00:21:33] Tommy Thomas: What’s the most ambitious project you’ve ever undertaken and how did you get the team to follow you?
[00:21:41] Samuel Chiang: Probably the most ambitious one that I’ve taken was when we did the First Light Project. First Light Project was a technology project.
And then to have content providers that will link in with the studies of the Chinese word of all resident on a software program into China. Now, we have to remember, this is back in the mid 90s and late 90s. And everything back then, it was still slow. A cell phone was not really in existence. People remember satellite phones.
And then people in China were still at that time, having some scriptures, scripture was at that time, sometimes carried into China. And oftentimes, the good work of your friend Ed Cannon, FEBC, and then, Trans World Radio were broadcasting into China and people were scribing word for word the precious word of God, and we thought in a multiple horizon scenario, they will have the software and technology available to them.
[00:23:01] Samuel Chiang: Maybe what we could do is provide Bible resident on the software with content writers on it, and then give it to the church in China. That was avant garde. It was at the forefront of its time. And, trying to get people around the world on it, has been, that wasn’t just in Hong Kong, but it would get people around the world on it was both exciting and exhausting.
[00:23:27] Tommy Thomas: So, if I could have shadowed you for maybe a year or so during that time, what would I have observed? What would you be doing?
Oh, wow. If you were shadowing me back in the 90s during that period of time, you would probably get something like this on a typical day. I would be in Hong Kong. Early in the morning, making calls to North America, trying to raise funds.
I would be during the daytime working with technical teams and contacting teams first to make sure the accuracy of the Bible in digital format will be there. And then in the afternoon, I will be working with the technical teams in India because it was not a Chinese team that wrote it.
It was actually the technical team in India that wrote the software for it, for the Chinese Bible. And so that would be a typical day of working, very exciting.
[00:24:26] Tommy Thomas: I want to stick with the technology piece for a minute. I know our good friend, Bill Hendricks, told me that you’d been involved in a couple of AI projects.
Can you take us into the world of AI and how it intersects with the nonprofit sector in general, and maybe talk about some pros and cons, some risks and rewards.
[00:24:46] Samuel Chiang: Yeah, sure. A little bit about AI, artificial intelligence, is, for me, the ones I have been involved in, very specifically, it was 2016 on a Sunday morning. I read in the news that Google AI beat the South Korean in gold chess. And then the newspaper reported that in any given second, the Google AI could calculate a hundred million moves. That got my mind thinking very quickly about the number one issue at that time in Bible translation was in sign language, there was not a scripture, not a full text of scripture for sign language.
And it got my mind thinking that people who are deaf in the deaf community when they sign, our body could only make so many gestures. To us, it might seem like millions, but it’s a limited set. It’s not unlimited. So, we thought maybe the computer vision could help solve that. And so that got us started on the artificial intelligence side of things and we created a not for profit and, and ultimately, we filed patents in that not for profit and then, a year and a half after it got started, not only the US Trademark and Patent office approved all those patents, the board of that not for profit asked us to spin it out into a for profit company and we did ultimately.
[00:26:39] Samuel Chiang: So that’s a little bit of background to that. Could I expand a little bit?
[00:26:44] Tommy Thomas: Absolutely. You’re talking to a novice here. I’m probably learning as much or more than anybody that’s listening to this.
[00:26:50] Samuel Chiang: When we spun it out. The company name is called Avodah, AVODAH.com or AVODAH.ai.
[00:27:01] Samuel Chiang: It is a God story that we actually got that name. We had prayed in wanting to have a single word that would represent, work, worship and service. And we knew the Hebrew name for it, that the word for it, Avodah or Avoda. But to grab that domain name was not the easiest.
[00:27:25] Samuel Chiang: We’re very thankful to God that it came. And as we spun it out, into the for profit, it’s actually working on both the healthcare side as well as the language side, so as to serve, again, the language communities, who are without the word of God. And then also the healthcare side, for what we call ambient technology, ambient sensing.
[00:27:50] Samuel Chiang: So, it stays in the background. And it listens to your case. Let’s just say you were the doctor. I walked into your office. You’ve maybe had a nurse practitioner that will meet with me, take my case, and then you as a doctor would meet me and look at the summary of the nurse practitioner has written down.
And the ambient AI technology sits in the background listening to the conversation once with the nurse practitioner and the second time again with the doctor. And then it’s AI assisted, in helping, the doctor to either confirm or augment the decision and then on top of that, once the patient leaves it does automatic coding into the insurances, et cetera.
[00:28:40] Samuel Chiang: So that will reduce the amount of time in a doctor’s office, the front office, and then it increases the ability for doctors to serve more patients and, hopefully, save money and maybe increase the revenue.
[00:28:56] Tommy Thomas: Wow. You hear people that are fear mongers about AI and what it might do to us and then you hear a story like that obviously made a huge difference. Where does the fear mongering play in?
[00:29:14] Samuel Chiang: Yeah, I think the fear mongering is very real and, unfortunately, people have misused AI in many different senses from voice for actors to pictures that portray individuals wrongly.
[00:29:31] Samuel Chiang:: And then of course, people use it, in ways that influence and affect, ultimately to the elections. All those are in place. So it is a very large piece that is under consideration for many of the societies right around the world. And it is a concern.
(00.20.56) Tommy Thomas: Thank you for joining us today. If you are a first-time listener, I hope you will subscribe and become a regular. You can find links to all the episodes at our website: www.jobfitmatters.com/podcast.
If there are topics you’d like for me to explore, my email address is [email protected]. Word of mouth has been identified as the most valuable form of marketing. Surveys tell us that consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all other forms of advertising.
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“My grandfather, who was an attorney, discouraged me from becoming a defense lawyer because sometimes you could be defending somebody, and then in the midst of a trial they confess to you everything. And you’re stuck. It’s very difficult to handle those types of things in the midst of a trial.” -Samuel Chiang
Links and Resources
Next Gen Nonprofit Leadership with Tommy Thomas
The Perfect Search – What every board needs to know about hiring their next CEO
Orality Breakouts – Using Heart Language to Transform Hearts – Samuel Chiang & Avery T. Willis
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