Latest / The Action Catalyst / Check Your Comms, with Janice Kapner | (Communications, Leadership, Transformation, Business)

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Check Your Comms, with Janice Kapner | (Communications, Leadership, Transformation, Business) · The Action Catalyst

• 0:30
  Host: Janice Kapner is the founder and CEO of the Kapner Perspective Group and a former communications leader with Microsoft, as well as Chief Communications and Corporate Responsibility Officer at T-Mobile, where she spent more than a decade during a period of rapid growth, transformation, and high stakes decision making. Janice, welcome.
• 1:03
  Janice Kapner: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
• 1:05
  Host: Looking back at your incredible breadth of experience, you've just come from T-Mobile, where you spent over a decade, and you actually played a role in the largest telecom merger in US history. Tell us a little bit about the role you played there during that process, if you might.
• 1:21
  Janice Kapner: Sure, I will be honest, I sort of stumbled into T-Mobile, right time, right place. After a decade at Microsoft, I sort of stopped myself long enough to say, are you just tootling along, or are you making conscious sort of career decisions? Do you want to be here? I, my original plan with Microsoft was to come up from Silicon Valley and do two years, and we were going to go back to California, and I was there for 10, and loved it, but at 10 years, sometimes you just have to step back, and it just happened that during that exploration process, T-Mobile was starting what was going to turn out to be an amazing turnaround. I just, you know, you don't know that at the time, right time, right place worked out, took the job, there was a catalyst in play that the management team and, and the majority share owners were looking at, which was this merger, and, and so it became really a two-year adventure, even after the, you know, terms were struck on the deal of
• 2:15
  working not just in the Beltway, but the state AGs, we had to really show them how this was going to be good for consumers, and actually create more competition, because it was counterintuitive, but telling that story over and over and over again to all these different stakeholders, some of whom you know are just anti-merger, anti-big merger, some of whom may not understand telco, I mean, the FCC obviously does, but you're dealing with a lot of state AGs that deal with a lot more than just our industry, and you had to be very careful about what you did as a company, so that you, you know, the nobody would paint a negative picture of, oh, we did this thing, and let's use that against them in the merger, and so it was a very front-footed, conscious, you know, hard-fought effort for quite some time, and I had been through mergers by both sides multiple times, but nothing of this size and scale. To your point, on the largest one in telco history, you know this was just a behemoth. This
• 3:10
  was a whole different ball game, and we just had to keep chipping away at it. And at the time, you just do it, and then you come out of it, and you look back, and you're like, we did it, and you're so happy, and high five, and everybody, but then a little more distance, a little more, a few more years behind you, and you realize how big it really was, and integration of the two companies took multiple years after we even got the deal done, and that was a whole nother, you know, chapter.
• 3:32
  Host: So you're a Verizon Wireless customer then I'm sure.
• 3:36
  Janice Kapner: No, can't say I am.
• 3:38
  Host: So, you know, right now, as we were recording this, there are a number of really big mergers and acquisitions being discussed, very high profile, so this is very timely when it comes to M & A. When it comes to navigating transformation and change, what do companies need to keep in mind in terms of specifically maintaining their trust and their credibility throughout that process? But maybe even once the merger is complete.
• 4:01
  Janice Kapner: Yeah, I'm actually going to start with the after, just because I think for some people there is a little bit of a misnomer that once the deal is closed you're done, and actually really the work is just beginning, and that sounds a little cliche, a little stereotypical to say, but it's, it could not be more true that if you're going to do all this work to get a deal done, not just get to terms, but actually get it through all the process, and you want to reap any value of that for customers, employees, or shareholders, you actually then have to deliver on all the commitments that you've made, you have to actually do integration, you have to deliver on all that, and it's it's a whole new sort of set of chat, you have to operationalize for it. You can get across the finish line, but then not deliver. And so I think you have to bear that in mind, that it is a multi-year journey, even if the front end of it is only six to 12 months. You watch companies that
• 4:54
  sort of feel like the business aspect, the deal aspect, and the regulatory aspect are all you need to worry about. But the reality is, it can be easy to overlook the narrative and the communication and the role that plays, and it kind of goes back to a court principle for me, which is a degree of transparency about what's going on, even when you don't have clarity, don't have answers, or can't share for legal reasons or regulatory reasons, there's a way to be transparent, even in that, that doesn't mean talk about it every day. Look, for two years in the run up to closing our deal, we did not talk about the status of the merger every day. Management knew what they could and couldn't say, and it wasn't, I can't tell you, it was, hey, we're at this stage in the process, you know, we're on second base, or whatever analogy you want to use, and we're working through a number of regulatory issues, and I'm not at liberty to disclose this with you, but we feel good about it, and we should
• 5:47
  have more news in three months. That's very different than, hey, just trust me, we're doing, and go back and put your head down, do your job. People are too smart for that in this day and age, and, and the reality is, with the, you know, onset of social media and influencers, they have an opinion, they're going to share it, and if you just stand there silently and kind of give everybody the, you know, the strong arm of I can't talk to you or I'm not going to tell you just do your thing, then you should just anticipate that people will make up their own narrative, and that's never going to be to your favor. People aren't going to go out there and let me tell you why it's the best thing in the world, like that's not going to happen. You have to create a rhythm of communication at the right altitude, and not let it become a black hole of ambiguity and uncertainty, and, and I, and I really believe it helps to put a face to it, and that might be your chief legal counsel, that might
• 6:34
  be your CEO, that might be your CFO. It depends on the merger, it depends on the industry, depends on what your customer base is. People don't trust a brand, per se. You know what I mean. They may have trust in a brand, but they don't look to a logo to tell them, 'Yeah, well, I've been a customer a long time, and this makes me uncomfortable, but I'm not going to make a change right now, because it could work to my benefit. You just have to kind of put together a strategy that says, 'Okay, how are we going to continue to drive our business forward, and by the way, smart money says drive your business forward anyway, because if the deal doesn't happen, you have momentum you need to be maintaining, or you're not doing your shareholders, you know, the obligation that you have committed to deliver on. So you bring your team in and you build a plan, and it errs on the side of great transparency. You just have to talk to people. You would be stunned at how many leaders don't.
• 7:25
  Host: What kinds of things, particularly at a really high level, do boards and CEOs always grossly underestimate in these large scale changes?
• 7:36
  Janice Kapner: My opinion, it is a little bit of the resource investment. I don't mean necessarily in my discipline of communications, but just the resource investment of, you see, some companies, and I think I can countermand this with T-Mobile, because actually we really didn't do this, and so somebody somewhere had had the experience to say we need to plan accordingly, but I have seen companies sort of like, oh, you're gonna do it off the side of your desk until the deal gets done, it's kind of just work it off the side of your desk, except for maybe the legal team will have some designated resources. You may still get the deal done. I think it'll take longer. I think there's more risk to it, and I think it'll be a lot slower start on the integration once the deal is done, if you're treating it as a little bit of a, of a off the side of the desk side thing. So, I do think there's a resourcing component. I think there's a contingency planning, and you have to be careful
• 8:27
  what you put in writing, because everything's discoverable. And then people think, well, if you've got a contingency for no deal happening, then you don't really need the deal to happen. Well, come on, the reality is no company who's doing their shareholders a job is not at least thinking about what happens if this doesn't come to fruition, and how do we continue to maintain our business? It sounds so rudimentary and so basic, but you would just be stunned at how many people don't do it. So, just, you just got to invest the time in the people and treat it like, you know, this is a major investment for the company for a long-term return, and it's not, it's not a sidebar, and I see more of that now, but boy, in early days of my career, there was a lot of, like, yeah, we had these three people working that deal.
• 9:09
  Host: Earlier, you mentioned your tenure at Microsoft. During your time at Microsoft, you were part of the launch of Office 365. Can you tell us a little bit about the role you held at the time there, and the role that you played in that launch?
• 9:21
  Janice Kapner: It's so funny, because now apps and services are just commonplace, but this is where you start to sound like that old professional who's been around a long time. It used to be software installations, right? And when Office was making the transition from being an app that was either pre-installed on the PC you purchased or purchased off the shelf, maybe downloaded, but really wasn't even that common to do that into this service. It was this big transformation that obviously financial models have been run, and but you had consumers that had to change their behavior, and I, when I came to Microsoft, I was acquired in through a teeny startup called. Placeware, which is a deadhead competitor for Webex. Now, Webex made it through the IPO process, and the bubble burst literally after Webex landed, and before we did, and it was this big platform to host virtual meetings up to 3000 or some large number, I can't recall. And so scale was a differentiator, and
• 10:10
  people weren't sure they even cared about these whole virtual meetings. It was like virtual seminars were kind of the niche that people were using back in the day, pre-pandemic, when everybody learned how to do virtual meetings, and Microsoft came calling and decided they wanted to acquire the company, and largely on Teams. If you ever use that, the platform, a lot of that code that's embedded there, the genesis is from that place where acquisition, and over the years, it was named different things, and at first it was a server, and then it was made into a service, but when I was at Microsoft, they incubated the business unit initially, right? So they acquired this little company in, and their methodology, when you're that small, unlike the Sprint T-Mobile merger, where we really had to integrate, was, hey, we're gonna incubate you under a Microsoft business leader until the businesses of certain size and scale, where we would plug you into mainstream marketing
• 11:01
  and mainstream sales, and so on and so forth. And I'll never forget going into a marketing pitch, because you had to get approval to do advertising, and I had to explain the whole business model, not because they weren't brilliant people, but it was not their world, it was not what they lived in, and they were like, well, I don't understand why you can't advertise when you have your next release of the service, and I was like, we release new capabilities literally every month, it's a service, it's just new stuff all the time, now in apps it's new stuff randomly, whenever they get enough critical mass built, and you get an update on it, you know, I look back on that, and I remember that was the beginning of real evolution that now Microsoft has fully embraced and gotten in front of with converting Office 365 to service, and that was the launch where we were like, we have to communicate to people, you're gonna have an icon installed, so when you have human behavior
• 11:51
  who buys a PC and you're looking for your Office capabilities, it'll be there, but you have to teach people that there's a login now and that we're gonna do updates, and it's a subscription-based, and so you know, we had to do all kinds of creative things, whether that was trying to show that you could host a meeting from anywhere. I think at the time there was a little bit of, well, we'll see what this does, and obviously now you can't go into buy software anymore, pretty much for anything. It was great fun to do, and you had a lot of energy around that when you were one of the big P and L's, but it was the beginning of a pretty big transformation on that particular software to service, which in the time all similar to mobile, you just do it, and then you look back and you go, hmm, that was kind of an interesting pivot, both professionally to navigate the narrative and in the industry, as everybody moved away from software installs into into service and apps.
• 12:42
  Host: You know, of course during that time at Microsoft, you had the pleasure of working on a team under Bill Gates. We even actually saw an interview that you did with him.
• 12:50
  Janice Kapner: Oh, I was nervous that day, that was.. I hadn't been there very long, and I can't remember how it came to pass, but it was, you know, we wanted to pre-record something in a friendly capacity with an employee, and somewhere somebody said, you know, you should do it, and I was like, that's fine, and I'll never forget, you don't think about it a whole lot. I don't know about you and your process, but it's not my process, and so I didn't really think about it too much, because I knew I'd get too nervous in advance. But then we got there, and that man is just so impressive in his sheer ability to process, right, his just the intellectual capacity, the breadth of knowledge. I felt like, and this may or may not be true, but I felt like even in the conversation I could imagine him having six or seven different conversations going while he's talking to me and not missing a beat, right? Like, over here, he's thinking about what they need to do on this product and this, you
• 13:39
  know, because he just, he presents that sort of calmly and smartly he didn't love press and PR was never, you know, I think he was pretty transparent about that, was not his favorite thing to do, so this, because it was an in-house thing to be used externally, he was very, you know, kind and patient, but I had this moment, I sat down, we were waiting for him to come in, and I just had this biggest exhale, and I realized that was really, you know, because all you, all that's going through your head is, can I please just not look like an idiot. This guy is ridiculously smart. He's built this company from the ground up. He's wicked fast. I just don't like.. I don't expect to be memorable, but I just don't want to look like an idiot, you know. And he was very kind, and.. and I just.. you felt like it was a professional moment of, okay, I did that. You know, you have those few moments when you're a company that size where you get the exposure to Bill. We got to leverage Bill
• 14:27
  for a launch event, and you know, same thing. It was very.. you need to be efficient and be on your game and have your answers, because he's not loving that he's devoting time to a stage event for press and that kind of thing, but he knows it's a bit of a necessary thing for the product, but like, don't be known because you didn't have your act together, you know. With Bill, it was this calm demeanor. I mean, I saw him lose his patience at events. It's not like he wasn't, you know, human, but there there was this sort of settled, thoughtful intellectual processing of everything, you know, and I always felt. Like he would process it all, and he would look for the edge cases, you know, where other people maybe may make kind of a linear, or even two or three linear paths. I always felt like he was also then going to look way out here at the fringe of what about and what about, and have we contemplated, or.. and I'm sure that that's how you come up with the genesis for
• 15:16
  the ideas that created the company, is to be that kind of a thinker. So with him, you sort of always felt like you were in the presence of just a sheer intellectual calm, is the only word, and even though I, again, I saw him when he would get impatient, there he just, he likes to problem solve, my interpretation, and I don't know that well, but my interpretation was, you felt like, I want, I problem solve, and I'm going to stress test everything, and I'm going to look around all the corners, and look at all the chess moves, and that's how it felt to me. Might that would be my read from my, you know, what time I did get to spend in the room with him. You had, I think it was like over 70% of employees at the time were developers, and and so the worship that they have for a Bill, you can't replicate that, you know.
• 15:58
  Host: A question I wanted to ask you before we run out of time here. Oftentimes, leaders need to be able to drive outcomes across teams that they don't directly control. How do you lead with authority in a situation where you are not technically the authority?
• 16:17
  Janice Kapner: Yeah, I don't know when I figured this out, but I wish it had been sooner, as just professionally, because in my discipline I rarely owned much, right? You know, I don't own a product, I'm not building a product, I don't own a revenue target, I'm not doing that, I don't, you know, own a IT deliverable and infrastructure, I don't, or whatever the case might be, and that doesn't mean I'll talk about all of those things, and Microsoft was a good groundbreaker for the in Silicon Valley. I did a lot of startups, which meant I wore a lot of hats, so I got to learn a lot about different parts of a business, marketing, product management, program management, PR, you know, like, and so that was good grounding. It helped me hone in on what I was good at and what I liked, as well as, you know, just get me grounded in what these departments have to do, and I think my first learning on stakeholdering was completely by accident, because when I was a small company
• 17:06
  that doesn't exist anymore in Silicon Valley, they - I came in, it was a bit of a recession, and I just couldn't find a job, and so they hired me to work the front desk, but they promised me that I would do work for the marketing guy and get to do things, and as the company grew, they would, and it was a risk, but I needed to work, and they were true to their word, and they threw me at various marketing and PR projects, and I must have done okay, because six months in, he said, "Hey, we're going to promote you to a program manager, and we're going to hire a full-time receptionist. Great, wonderful. First job, go build a beta program. You got it. Walk out of the room. What the blankety blank blank is a beta program? Like, I literally was like, now the good news is I had built relationships as a small company with the engineering team, and we had kind of bonded, and we pulled a lot of late nights because I was doing a lot of different tasks. I was putting in a lot of hours
• 17:56
  early in career learning everything, and I went to one of the engineers, like, "What is the pain we're gonna develop development? and he educated me, right, and you know, and he was a stakeholder, and he, his code was going to be put through this program, and so he sort of taught me, and I put some stuff together, and it worked out okay, but you realize that, like, you need to be, you need those relationships. That doesn't mean you have to go for drinks with everybody all the time. I'm actually not that person, but you do have to forge relationships with these people that are going to be stakeholders if you want to get something done. And as I went through, you know, and got into bigger jobs and bigger companies, what I found is, if you understand the business, if you learn the business, you don't have to learn it to the degree that the sales leader has it, or that the product, like, you know, you're never going to be a subject matter expert in everything, that's too,
• 18:46
  it's too wide, you can't go that deep. But you do need to understand the sales team is facing this kind of problem. The network team, or the product development team, is facing these kinds of challenges and hurdles. These guys have these goals. These people have this goal. If you don't understand that, I don't know how you can have an intelligent conversation with anybody across the table and have them listen to you, because the discipline of PR and communications is often an eye roll, and that's okay. It works for some companies, but if you're looking to get value out of it and you're looking to avoid pitfalls, manage a crisis, land a new CEO, whatever the thing is. Then they need to be at the table, they need to understand the business, so that they understand who they're talking to and what their goals are, because you're not going to convince the guy across the table to do something that completely contradicts their goals unless you have a really compelling reason
• 19:36
  and an alt path for them. So I think that's the biggest thing that I always would get frustrated, somebody say to you, I'm just the PR person. Well, no, you're not. You're an employee at a company, and you should understand the fundamentals if you want to convince anybody at any level to partner with you to achieve something, and you have to build the your own credentials, hopefully before you are in a position where you're trying to convince. Somebody of something, because you know, I had an employee once, super smart, smart person, and she was like, well, I don't know why you hired me if you're not going to do what I'm recommending, and it was very early in the hire, in the tenure of the individual, and I said, you know, I learned a long time ago from a senior leader at Microsoft, your experience got you hired, that doesn't mean we, that anybody inside the company, suddenly just going to defer to you. We've got you here now. You have to earn that credibility all over again,
• 20:26
  because you don't know this business, you don't know these players, you don't know the nuance of what we're trying to do, or not do, or avoid, or navigate. Once people sort of figure that as a little bit of humility, like build some resilience, recognize it's a minute, both to build credibility, and you probably, for every 15 ideas you pitch, you might get one yes, you know, I mean, and that has to be okay, because there's things you don't know, you have to recognize you're not going to know everything, and have some thick skin resilience to be like, I'm going to learn the business, I'm going to sit the table, I'm going to have an active voice, I'm going to throw out ideas, I'm going to understand that those ideas will often be not taken. Hopefully, in a good company, it's a polite conversation of, like, I totally understand why that might be brilliant. There's two or three things you don't know about, and we can't do it. Okay, that's not about you,
• 21:15
  you know. You just have to build that resilience to go with your business knowledge, and then you got to have a voice, if you could put those things together and build those relationships. Eventually, people are like, the first time I was at T-Mobile, and somebody said, "You need, we need to get Janice in here, she needs to be in these meetings, like, you know, you're like, ah, they want my input, which is super flattering, but also why I'm there, that's job security, that's career development, it's a compliment.
• 21:42
  Host: Well, look, if people want your input right now, all they need to do is get in touch with you at Kapner Perspective Group. Tell us how they can do that.
• 21:50
  Janice Kapner: They can go to KapnerPerspectiveGroup.com or janicekapner.com and it's the best feeling.
• 21:57
  Host: Well, Janice, it's been a genuine pleasure talking to you today. Thank you for being so generous with your time and joining us.
• 22:02
  Janice Kapner: Well, thank you. I appreciate it. It was, it was great to chat and go a little bit down memory lane. I've talked about some of these things a while, so it was great.