Latest / You've Been Heard / 372- Reverse Mentorship Leadership w/Larry Monuteaux

Transcript

372- Reverse Mentorship Leadership w/Larry Monuteaux · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Dissecting popular IT Nerds. Today we got Larry Monte Monito and Larry is a fellow VP of Information Technology. Hey Larry, why don't you tell us a little about yourself, sir.
• 0:25
  Speaker B: Hi Mike, Glad to be here. I am an IT leader in Boston area. I currently have a small team working at a property management company. We handle everything from end user support all the way to network design for both our building management systems and building security, as well as tenant amenities like fitness centers and conference rooms and you know, a lot of AV and things like that.
• 0:53
  Speaker A: So how long have you been doing that with the property company? And tell me a little more about some of your background. Where'd you get the spark in it?
• 1:03
  Speaker B: Well, I originally wasn't going to be an IT person. I had, my goal in my, in life was to be a teacher. I was an English major in school and I was into reading and writing about literature and poetry and, and I really wanted to be a teacher. I got trained for and got certified to teach high school. Okay. This was in the mid-90s, so 30 years ago and back then there were no jobs for teachers like today. I think there's a shortage of teachers, but.
• 1:41
  Speaker A: Right.
• 1:42
  Speaker B: Well.
• 1:42
  Speaker A: And a shortage of pay for teachers too.
• 1:44
  Speaker B: A shortage of pay too? Yeah, yeah. But a lot of people I knew were, were trying to in different school systems and then hope somebody retires or, or some opening happens and they have a little bit of experience, maybe some of the people know them. So I, I didn't really like that idea of just having nothing steady and you know, hoping I get a phone call that morning to come in the last minute because some teacher called in sick or. So I just got a job and it happened to be in an IT department and I was just doing data entry and like swapping back out backup tapes and running reports and things like that. Just low level stuff. And, and this is still in the.
• 2:26
  Speaker A: 90S, so it's still.
• 2:28
  Speaker B: Yeah, this is 95.
• 2:30
  Speaker A: 95. So Windows 3.1.1. So there's some color and. But it's still a lot of dos.
• 2:37
  Speaker B: Yeah, we were, we're doing, I was writing reports in paradox. Windows 3.1, they had a call center at this place that I was at. So they had a, like a UNIX system that ran their call center and I didn't know what I was doing so I just swapped the backup tapes and I ran commands that they told me to run. I didn't know what IT back then, but I started to pick it up and Started to learn more and started to eventually help people at the company with installing things or basically starting to do support. It was a small company, they didn't really have a support function, just the programmers and things used to help people.
• 3:18
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's why I started laughing when I heard that you wanted to be a teacher first. Because I'm like, that's all I do inside of it is detail. So keep going, keep going.
• 3:30
  Speaker B: Well, so eventually came full circle in a way. So I really like doing the support. I like, I mean, there's a teaching component to that if you want there to be. So I said, you know, I'd like, I'd like to do this as my job. And I left there and I started doing support full time. And it was great. I was learning a ton. I started learning about, you know, networking a little bit. So I was publishing apps a lot because I had a lot of remote people or distributed people. They were around the country and they needed to use an app that really needed to be next to a SQL Server. So, you know, you publish that out and they can use it from anywhere. So I did that for quite a while. People started to tell me that they wish that I was the manager, and I resisted that for a long time.
• 4:22
  Speaker A: I had your coworkers or the people.
• 4:25
  Speaker B: Throughout the organization, coworkers, mostly people that were like, I would be assist admin and somebody from the help desk would need me to do something with them. They would escalate something to me and I'd work with them and I would kind of teach them what we were doing and how I went about troubleshooting. And they mean like, I wish you were my boss. And it was nice to hear that. But I had had bosses in the past that regretted going into leadership because they felt like, got too far away from the technology. And so I was, I didn't want to kind of pursue that path because I didn't want that to happen to me. So I did the sysadmin system engineering for a long time and in 2015, I took a leadership role. And that's when I think it kind of came full circle. I. I became like a. A leader and a mentor at a team and I could take them kind of under my wing and I could lend my experience to them and be the boss that I had wished that I had in, in my years coming up. And I definitely found that I wanted to be a servant leader type person. And that's what I believe today. You know, I focus and I tell my team, I focus on you guys, and I want you to be happy, and I want to give you what you need to be happy and successful and, you know, and. And. And get people off your back if. If you're being pressured. And. And I think that the organization benefits more from that, from that night, taking that attitude than if I was a company man saying, you know, crack the whip or do this or that. And they do. They're happier. They're doing better work. They're more enthused about what they're doing. And the organization benefits. They. They have give better service. I don't feel embarrassed or chained about that at all.
• 6:19
  Speaker A: I'm curious where. Who modeled that for you? Who mentored you in a way that. That you knew that that's how.
• 6:28
  Speaker B: Or.
• 6:29
  Speaker A: Or was it so many examples of not that that that's. You went the other direction because that's what you wanted?
• 6:36
  Speaker B: Yeah, I. I think it's the latter. I. I had a lot of bosses and managers, directors that I was like, I would never do that that way. And I found myself saying that a lot more. And that's when I thought maybe it was time for me to take on a role and see how I would perform and how I would do that. I don't really feel like I had a mentor coming up or in my early career. So I want to be that for other people because I know what it's like to not have that. Yeah.
• 7:08
  Speaker A: I mean, that working with networking at that time and starting at that period that you did, there weren't that many trailblazers before us. And, you know, I. I really started in my career, like 2001. Prior to that, I was bartending. So, you know, it. That. So I brought a customer service aspect to. To the way that I approach things. And. But yeah, there just wasn't anybody that we could look to. To follow or any of the mentors. Anybody that we looked to was like, way off over in the distance and had done some amazing things. And we were just left with, all right, figure it out, or here's the manual.
• 7:54
  Speaker B: Well, today people, they major in it. That wasn't a thing back then. No certifications and stuff. Instead.
• 8:05
  Speaker A: For me, I blended. I was doing well in the computer classes and doing well in business classes and was because of the bartending was understanding of business. So I had a teacher that said, hey, why don't you combine those two? Yeah. So I was like, oh, okay, that works. So as I did the cyber stalking, you mentioned some about working with global teams. Tell me, what was one of the surprising Things of working with global teams.
• 8:42
  Speaker B: I found that there was a language barrier where I was assured that there wouldn't be, that there wasn't one. So I remember a weekly meeting I used to run for folks in the US and in India and the Indian guys would not have any questions. But they, then I've come to find out later that they didn't get what the US guy was saying. And I, that was a challenge because I didn't know how to, you know, because I, I said, do you have any questions? Are you sure you get this? Because this is the time to ask these questions. This is where we're hashing this out. You know, this is the meaning for that. If we don't answer that this today, we're not going to meet again for another week. So we might not get anything done, you know, this, this coming week. So it's a cultural barrier to, to, to questioning people. There's a lot of differential treatment. And, and I, and I'm like, we're all on the same team, we're all working together. But none of that mattered any, none of that what I said would say mattered. So what I ended up doing was I was also the note taker for the meeting. And what I would do is I would take the notes live in a shared screen and I would, you know, email these out to everybody that attended. And so I, I was composing the email as we go and everybody could read what I was typing, what, what was happening, and I was typing it in real time. And, and this is also good for the speaker saying, dude, am I getting that right? And they could read it too. And then because the, the folks on the call could read the, the bullets or whatever in the, in the, on the screen, then there was little time to really process that. And then all of a sudden more key questions were being asked and, and things were getting hashed out and problems were getting solved. Much better. And it was just like a little thing that, just taking the notes, I mean, I was doing. It didn't slow the meeting down. We were still having the meeting. I needed to take the notes anyway. Just sharing my screen didn't take any extra time. And it made all the difference in the world.
• 11:04
  Speaker A: Yeah, it helped bring the team together and got through that cultural barrier. So were most of your experiences working with a single country or was it multiple countries, multiple cultures?
• 11:17
  Speaker B: I would say about half and half. Roughly. Roughly half and half. I've, I've done a lot with remote teams since I guess, 2015. Now I'm in a US based company. Yeah, back then I, I did a lot more of that. I, the couple years ago, right before COVID I was in a role where I had a team, where I had a couple people in Shanghai, a couple people in Pune, a couple guys in Europe. And so I would spend my, my days were meeting heavy at the beginning and they'd start early, so I usually did like half a day at home. I would start my day at 5, 5:30 just because it's already 6pm in Shanghai, you know, so people are already staying late just to meet with me. And so then I would head into the office, you know, midday and then work the remainder of the day on, on my other stuff, any, any of.
• 12:09
  Speaker A: The cultural lessons with, with that group. And, and I have to admit I'm amazed that you were able to take notes while somebody else was talking because I am horrible at that. I, I, I'm staring at the keyboard so.
• 12:23
  Speaker B: Well, I don't know how good I am at it. And everybody had to, had to suffer maybe watching me, you know, peck my way through it. But yeah, I mean I, I think, I think one of the things I learned in that, in that role and in other roles is that you have to think about each individual person that reports to you need and somebody might be like, I can give you a project. And I say listen, let me, you know, check in with me when you need to, let me know how it goes. If you need me for anything, you know, that's, and another person I might need to help work with them step by step because they, they're, you know, they're newer or they, they are shy or they don't want to, you know, whatever the case may be. And some people need more FaceTime and some people like just do their own thing and they, they don't, they don't want to be bothered. They, you know, somebody needs a reassurance that they're doing a good job. Somebody else wants me to be more understanding if they need to have a unexpected time off or something. You know what I mean? So everybody's different. And so with my part of my job is to figure out what they need to make them happy and successful in their role and to appreciate them personally.
• 13:39
  Speaker A: So you know, as I too have tried to have that servant leader mentality with, with my teams and, and my co workers, I wonder how much, how was it the first time you had to let somebody go when you, when you faced that, that those first few times, how, how much of a struggle was it? Because I know I I struggled with that one.
• 14:02
  Speaker B: That's awful. I, I'm, I'm not that great at that. I'm more of a carrot person than a stick person. So I, it's, it's hard for me to call attention to, to deficiencies, but that's, that's necessary too, because that people learn from that too, and they're learning from their mistakes. As much I've, I've had to do that where I had to document issues, and it's just, it's just awful because I try to do everything I can do before I have to resort to that because I, I want to give them every opportunity to, to try to improve and, and I want to be there for them if they need me, but it, I've had to do that and there's no getting around that conversation when you have to have it.
• 14:52
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's, it's a difficult conversation. And, but one of the things that I found over time, those first few of them were for me, a real struggle and like you're talking about. But then I've also found that there's a lot of times where that, that time of honesty and that honest appraisal and, and just being straightforward with them as they're struggling and acknowledging those struggles so that they have that chance to improve those areas. But then, you know, I, unfortunately, I've had some of those co workers who just acknowledged them and didn't do anything to change it and, or continued to do other things that, that just kept making it worse. And, and so, you know, I, like, like we both said, it's never fun. But I also found that, you know, after I struggled so hard trying to, trying to give somebody that, that carrot so often that there were times where I, I hurt them by maintaining it for longer.
• 16:02
  Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah, I, I, I find that dangerous. Well, I mean, I think that, you know, being genuine and having time and, and, and connecting on a personal level, when the tough conversations have to happen, I think they're easier because I haven't been, you know, giving them a, you know, bull all this time that, you know, they, they, they can trust me. And I tell them when I'm, you know, sometimes I share if I'm frustrated about something else and, or I talk to them in confidence about what I think about something at the organization and they, I'm hoping that I build that rapport so that if they're having a struggle that maybe they approach me about it or if they don't, you know, when, when I have to approach them about Something, the conversation goes a little smoother, hopefully.
• 16:54
  Speaker A: So what are some of the surprising things that you've run into in your career? What's, like, what's one of the life lessons that you never expected going from being a teacher to doing technology and to leading the groups?
• 17:11
  Speaker B: Well, I don't know if I'm surprised by a lot of things anymore. I think I'm continually low level surprised by people still like the politics that happens that, you know, I mean, I know how to recognize that when it happens and I know how to protect myself. But it's surprising. I mean, I just want to get stuff done. You know, I just want to bring technology solutions to the organization. I don't want to step on anybody. And, you know, it's just, it's surprising to me how many people are focused on that. I, I just don't understand what, what do you get out of, of, out of doing that? I, I, it just doesn't, that's, I guess I'm continually surprised by that.
• 17:56
  Speaker A: Well, so, okay, along those lines then, how do we, how do we help the people that are listening to us that are struggling with some of that and have no idea how to either separate themselves from it? Because that's kind of one of the defenses I use is to separate myself from it and not participate in it and to focus in on accomplishing the things that I say that I'm going to do or that the team has promised to do. What thoughts do you have around that? What lessons can you help share?
• 18:34
  Speaker B: I think that as part of mentoring, I think a lot of that, especially for younger people, is to help them figure out how to recognize that when it's happening so that they know enough to take the steps to separate themselves from it, to avoid getting into those conversations and to show them the pitfalls that may be happening, to use examples about other things that happened among other people, because they might, that might not be apparent. And I rem, you know, looking back, I can see things that happened at the various companies I've been at that I didn't know at the time. You know, I couldn't see it because I was too green, you know, So, I mean, I think that's a, I don't know if I would be a good fit for somebody on my team that was looking to like, climb the ladder at somebody else's expense. I mean, it is a little bit different, I think a lot of times because we are in that support role. We're almost, or I would hope that we'd like to be Kind of on the side of a lot of that stuff.
• 19:44
  Speaker A: As I look through some of these things, I notice you prefer a well thought out, well designed approach. What, what lessons taught you that? Because I, I'm guessing that with no mentor in the beginning and so nobody to really show you the ropes, that's. That's something that you learn with experience. Yes, that, that spending more time planning it out exactly how to implement something is worth a lot more than just going after it. Because there's so many times we as it. It was just like, hey, I need this and we go running off after it. And.
• 20:32
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think I've seen the negative results of that so much, especially in smaller orgs with their. They don't either don't have enough of an IT group or don't have any IT group. I mean, I, I think the ideal, you know, position to go into is a company that's kind of exiting out of that kind of informal phase of its life and it wants to kind of put some, you know, policies in place and procedures in place and standards. And I love, you know, transforming an org from, from that to, to something, something that is something scalable, repeatable, recorded, logged. It's. Because I've seen it so many times. Let's just, let's just get it done. I'm like, well, I know, but we can take it just a few minutes more and make a procedure and that we can repeat going forward. And if we do it the certain way that we can do it again and again and again, we will regret it if we don't. And it just takes a minute more, you know, it's just. And you know, a lot of times people are reluctant to do that or they resist it, you know, because they either feel like they are going to lose their unique role maybe if we automate something, for example, or they like the fact that they're the holder of the tribal knowledge and that's a touchy situation sometimes. So it requires. Sometimes people need to be. You have to bear witness to folks when they tell you all the work that they've been doing all this time and, and how nobody appreciates it and, and that, you know that. And that's true. They did all that work and nobody appreciated them. And let's work together to try to, you know, put this system in place, to automate that. And we're going to use your knowledge about the way things worked to design this system because you're the only one that really knows how every, all the pieces fit together. And you Know, my hope is that people are put at ease by that. It's certainly. I need them because I don't know how it worked. That's, that's part of project planning is to, is to figure out how it, it's worked up till now. What, what, what manual processes, for example, do we have to account for?
• 22:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, that discovery process of, of tribal knowledge, especially if that tribal knowledge folder is either gone or doesn't want to share.
• 22:58
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a, that's a huge challenge. Yeah.
• 23:02
  Speaker A: And, and right back into the politics.
• 23:05
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 23:05
  Speaker A: Although a different branch than the, the people who are using other bodies to climb. This is, this is the, the. It's mine.
• 23:16
  Speaker B: I mean, there's a customer service builder part to that. There's a customer service part to that too. You know, like, you know, it's the same thing when I'm, when I'm, you know, if, if somebody is super frustrated because of an issue, I like that because, not that they're frustrated, but I like that challenge that I'm going to go and help them and I'm going to listen to them and I'm going to appreciate the frustration and express to them that it's not. Why is it that it shouldn't be working this way. And if I can end my interaction with them where they're happy and feel appreciated for the work that they do. There's too many IT people that perpetuate that opinion about how it is not your friend. And I want everybody to think that it is their friend. You know, at every, every organization I've been in, I've said to my manager, you can ask anybody in the company about me anytime and they will give you a good review because I treat them all very well and I give them great service and I treat everybody with good.
• 24:25
  Speaker A: I don't want special treatment. I want you to treat me like you treat everybody else. But, you know, being able, treating everybody like, like you're talking about makes. It just helps everybody to feel better about it.
• 24:37
  Speaker B: And.
• 24:38
  Speaker A: Yeah, but it, but it also makes it where they, they find you. Hey, come help me with this.
• 24:44
  Speaker B: Hey, come help me with that.
• 24:45
  Speaker A: Hey.
• 24:46
  Speaker B: Well, I mean, I, that's why I joke to people because people, sometimes they, they're like they are chasing you down. But also, sometimes people don't want to call because they want. Don't want to bother you. And I'm like, that's the whole reason I'm here. I mean, and so I, I make the joke. I'm like, you know, like, oh, I'm sorry to bother you. I'm like, oh. And it keeps me off the streets from wandering streets and getting in trouble. You know, I'm, I, I, you know, I'm glad you called.
• 25:10
  Speaker A: You know, keeps me from shopping on, on, yeah, on Prime Day.
• 25:17
  Speaker B: But I mean we are, we're all, we're. I mean the org, you know, presumably has a mission and everybody in that org is working toward that mission and they're all have a piece and they all have a part to play and they all need technology to do that job. And it's up to me to give them good solutions and also to fix their problems when they happen.
• 25:38
  Speaker A: So let's, let's change tack a little bit. What's, what's the biggest success that you had? That started as a, as a failure. I would, felt like a failure, you know.
• 25:51
  Speaker B: Yeah, I started at this company and they, I didn't really know how, what was going on. I had only been there a month or so and I, I came on to be the Citrix guy because they had a lot of Citrix apps. They, this company had a ton of apps. This is back in the XP days. So there was a lot more application installs than browser stuff. Anyway, they wanted to build a DMZ for the first time and this was a financial institution so they, they, they needed secure access to things. They never really had a remote access solution. And this is before everything is in the cloud, so everything's on premise. We have a massive data center. So to do anything you needed to be on site or you needed to be able to get in remotely. And our remote access solution was publishing applications through Citrix. So I was the Citrix guy and I had this big Citrix farm. But they wanted to make a DMZ to make that remote access secure. They wanted to bring people in through a load balancer and they chose Citrix nextscaler, which is a product that Citrix bought. It was a, it's a reverse proxy and load balancer appliance. And I had never worked with it before. I mean I knew conceptually what a DMZ was, but this project to implement it didn't have a scope or, or goals, you know, was they had a consultant that I don't really know if he really understood the netscaler how to use it. And, and so I was on that project with the head of the network team who was great on the network side but really didn't take to the, the reverse proxy thing. So I thought this, this project was failing and I wasn't really sure what the goals were. I mean, I had just started. So I talked to my director about all of that and he was a guy that you could talk to, so that was nice. And I said, you know, we really, we need someone else to come in and help us implement this. And I'm happy to learn everything about every day. And I learned inside and outside of the netscaler. And we implemented a DMZ and it became crucial to our remote access solution. You know, it became the way that people connected in remotely when there was a snowstorm or if they were sick. You know, there wasn't as much working from home that back then, but it became a possibility that you, you could actually do everything that you could do in the office remotely because of all these apps that we publish securely. It became the it, you know, is the load balancer in front of our secure file transfers with other financial institutions. You know, that stuff gets encrypted and transferred. Anything going in and out of our apprentice was fed through this, this device, this proxy. And eventually it became a big deal in our disaster recovery plan because again, with everything on premise, we had a warm site and we were replicating data and ideally four times a year we would go over, go to this hot site on a Saturday and cut the link and see what we could recover, you know, from what had been replicated. And we had an associated appliance at the, at the hot site that was handling so you could, in a disaster you would reconnect remotely, but if the, the main site had been destroyed by a disaster, you didn't know any better. Like you might not even know, but you would connect to the, to the disaster recovery site instead. So it was a huge success ultimately. And it's, it was. I never thought it would be even a, any sign of a success at all when we started. So I, I never really liked that appliance, but I learned a lot about load balancers and reverse proxies and it was a great experience and I'm, I'm glad to have worked on it.
• 30:10
  Speaker A: You said this was back in the XP days. What era? That's like the early or mid-2000s?
• 30:19
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's about 2006, I think.
• 30:22
  Speaker A: And so, you know, when I think of dmz, I'm thinking of like a hardened web server that goes out in the DMZ and then you've got the corporate network behind it that, for the Citrix environment that you're talking about. So the users would log in to hit like a basically A webpage and then.
• 30:43
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 30:43
  Speaker A: Get access to the Citrix and then have access to the internal network.
• 30:47
  Speaker B: Yeah, we had a web. A Citrix web interface server or eventually called Storefront in the, in the dmz. So they, from the outside, you could only ever get to the DMZ through this device. Okay. And then that device in turn had access internally. So you never directly accessed anything internally. Everything was proxied for you. You know, kind of like nat. You know, when you're going outbound, when you all go out as the same IP address. Well, when you're coming in, this is a reverse proxy, so it's, it's. Everything is accessed. Everything that's accessed internally is accessed by the IP of the device, not by the end user, wherever they may be.
• 31:28
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 31:29
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 31:30
  Speaker A: And which is pretty, pretty early into that, that capability at that time. I mean, so many, so many organizations had to understand and learn and just grab that by the, by the horns back in 2020. But you're talking 13 years before that, 14 years before that.
• 31:54
  Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I hate to say that it's maybe easier now, but it's. I mean, a lot of things are in the cloud now, so you just need to tell people what the URL is. You know, if, if you're a Office 365, you don't have to bring people in remotely to get their email. They just. They get their email the same way that they always did. You know, when you have that big data center.
• 32:13
  Speaker A: Yeah, the data center and all the shared files and the, the corporate apps and. Especially if you're a financial. Yeah, yeah, they definitely wanted to protect the money. Go figure.
• 32:25
  Speaker B: I mean, I mean, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to go back to the days of having a big data center. I mean, that's a lot of this. It's. I mean, you have to make sure that power is redundant and networking is redundant and all the appliances, firewalls and switches are redundant and cooling and you know, do you have a, do you need a generator? Do you have fire suppression? All that stuff that, that people don't have to think about anymore. I mean, you could start a company today and you just need an Internet pipe. You might not even really need and need an office. It. Depending on what you're doing. Everything's in the, in the cloud.
• 32:58
  Speaker A: It's amazing how a small company today can spin up so many things so fast without even knowing all of the fundamentals that we had to learn and understand to be able to build the infrastructures that we did back then.
• 33:13
  Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I think on the one hand, you know, the people that really need to know that stuff now are the people that work at, you know, AWS or Azure or, you know, hosting that stuff or, you know, colo kind of places that. To have that stuff. But on the other hand, I think I, I think that it's a very risky time right now where people are deploying things and those systems are talking to other systems and either, either other parts of say, AWS or across clouds to, you know, Google or Azure or whatever, and they don't really know as much about the way that communication ought to happen to secure it properly. And I think that that's a risky thing and I think that you hear, you see sometimes that that gets exploited, but I think there's a lot more, I'm afraid that there's a lot more out there that's, that's insecure. That's, you know, it was easier in the old days in the way because you had one way in and your firewall was this big, you know, big important thing, you know, and now I like zero trust where you, you know, you. Nothing, no host trusts any other hosts. And that's, that's nice, but takes a.
• 34:28
  Speaker A: Lot to get there.
• 34:29
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Especially if you're, if you're, if you're having different systems talking to each other across different networks, across different clouds, what traffic is that? Where do you opening to? What do you, you know, that architecture needs to be as well thought out as an on prem architecture.
• 34:47
  Speaker A: Even more well thought out, I think, because it was, you know, once you're inside the walls, you, you. It's easier to take for granted that the level of communication in between systems inside of a physical constrained building is one thing, but when it's a physical constrained building with all kinds of different foreign entities, I think that has all kinds of different connotations today. But with all kinds of different tenants and different companies and multiple people using the exact same hardware, there's ways that it's not as secured as it used to be because of the fundamental separation.
• 35:31
  Speaker B: Part of what you're paying for when you subscribe to a SaaS is not having to think about that.
• 35:36
  Speaker A: Right. But just because you're not thinking about it as you're paying for it doesn't.
• 35:41
  Speaker B: Mean it's being done. That's right, Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's the danger.
• 35:45
  Speaker A: It's the things that we need to learn today to make sure that we can vet, to make, to keep our organization Safe, you know, throughout your career. What's, what's a legacy system or some kind of a system technology that you saw get retired that, that you think it was retired too soon? Is there anything out there like that?
• 36:09
  Speaker B: Oh wow. Well, I was, I don't know if I thought it was retired too soon, but I was, it was bittersweet to see both Netware go and Citrix. I mean Citrix still around. I remember being a big network person and learning netware from network 3, network 4, network 5 and comparing it to the flat NT4 domain and how it was a nice LDAP compliant hierarchy with a tree and, and, and it was, it just, it seemed elegant to me and little did I know, I mean the group policy didn't exist at that, but, and after director came out and I'm like, oh, they're just trying to copy Noel. And then it became clear that not only are they going to compete well, but they're going to win. And I had to do some kind of a shell game to get my company switched over to Active Directory. But then I learned about group policy and I, I loved group policy back in the day. I still don't think you can do everything today, at least in 2025 with just intune policies and things that you can with the old group policy. Now obviously that was designed for an. On prem, you know, user, user bay user for, you know. But I was sad to see Novell go because that was a big deal for me. You know, that was the first thing I became like. I felt like I was an expert in, in my career. I like it when, if I do have to call tech support that they immediately will escalate me because if I'm calling, it's not for level one or level two, you know. And the same thing with Citrix. I mean Citrix is again, it's still out there, but there's many more. There's a lot fewer things that are running that you have to publish today. Mostly most new development is, is web based. You don't. I mean our, our people that are, we have building PCs. That's a lot easier today. I mean with intune deployment that's is even easier. You install the operating system, you get Office and like Adobe ARM it and you're done. Because mostly people are living their browser all the time. They might have 30 tabs open, but they used to have 30 applications running. Migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 was a massive project to us because we had to find out of the hundreds and hundreds of applications that we had in the organization. How many were compatible Windows 7 and how many did we have to figure out some other solution for? Those days are gone though. But I loved my Citrix Farm and I had it tuned just perfectly. People were load balanced among the server farm and some people didn't really notice that they were running an application remotely. They thought it might have been installed. Citrix was, was maybe the biggest example of something that I didn't know anything about. I went to a class at this company because I was going to be like the backup Citrix guy. So I went to the class and the, it was a terrible class, it was a weak class. And I came back and they're like well what do you think? I'm like well I don't know. I mean the guy wasn't really that great. I, I know enough to be the backup. I'll, I'll pick it up. They're like well you're going to need to do more than that because Brian just gave his notice and you're the primary guy. I'm like well all right. So I ended up another class. So I took the class again with a great instructor and I started me off and I started off at Citrix Metaframe 1.8 and that was on NT4 and I did Citrix upgrades all the way up to Xenapp. The consultant that we had that did the netscaler asked me if I wanted to go and work for him because he did Citrix, Citrix, netscalers and Xenapp and all that stuff and that was a lot of fun to doing that. The virtualization on that side of it was, was really fun. And then Desktop virtual desktop was, was even, even better in a way with VMware view and, and then it became Horizon. But I don't see a lot of Citrix Zen app as around any as much anymore except if it's a specialty app that, that hasn't been converted to a web version of it yet. Okay. We have a, an, an app that we use on the accounting side that it's web based but then there's a couple of functions that need, that aren't in there yet so they run a Citrix client and connect to it and run basically the Windows version of that app on premise at the, at the company, you know, who we buy from and eventually I think that'll go away too because they'll build that, they'll, it'll be, it's on their development pipeline I'm sure and they'll, they'll bring it into the web interface and then they won't need that anymore. And that's, that's sad, Bittersweet too, you know, I mean that was a, you know, Citrix used to be, they have their own conference and that was a big deal.
• 41:17
  Speaker A: So with you doing that at that time you were on kind of the leading edge of the remote utilization, hybrid connectivity, those kinds of things that are commonplace today. It makes me wonder what leading edge things are you getting to play with today? What's, what's keeping you interested in it and keeping you challenged? Because if you were doing that back in 2010, you know, most organizations didn't start doing that until 2015 or later.
• 41:51
  Speaker B: Well, right now we're looking at, so let me just say property management and financial services, which is basically the, the parent of property management because you know, these are all assets.
• 42:07
  Speaker A: For people who.
• 42:08
  Speaker B: Have lots of money. So like we have a parent company that, that buys these built, you know, these app these properties and my company manages them. But they're very change averse and they're, they're kind of slow, slower in updating. So and it's, it's not us, it's, it's all property management companies. So the exciting thing now is that we're looking at, well, what can we do with all of the data that we get at say in a building? So you have an office building and there's a lot of data generated in that building that's about occupancy, where people are and what floors they're on and which ones are vacant and which ones aren't and what hours people work. And that data can ultimately inform heating and cooling to be more sustainable, to be more energy efficient. And in a, in an office building again, there's hundreds and hundreds of pieces of equipment that keep the building running. Chillers and air handlers and filters and you know, hundreds and hundreds of these devices and those all need to be managed and maintained. And there's preventative maintenance done on all of them on, on, on widely varying schedules. And you know, a complex machine might have eight different separately warrantied items in it. You know, so how do we get, pull all that data about all that equipment and its age and the past for maintenance that's been done on it, a past repair work that's been done on it, what's its expectant life and how much it costs to maintain it, both in terms of just regular maintenance as well as repair and make intelligent decisions about how long we should keep this piece of equipment or you know, projections to budget Say you know, across your portfolio of properties, you might want like a system that could, this is kind of like an AI driven thing. So you kind of just train it and feed it the data from that you Coley, from all your, your buildings. And so say okay, in the next budget year you should budget X amount because you're going to probably need to replace this list of equipment in these buildings or you're going to spend this much predictably in your repairs. So you can kind of better plan.
• 44:37
  Speaker A: Budget wise that predictive maintenance, that preventative maintenance and create budgets around both of those for the next year or five years.
• 44:47
  Speaker B: So that, that's kind of interesting because that's a lot of that stuff is still done on spreadsheets and some of it's still done in paper. So I mean challenges, opportunities, I mean talk about tribal knowledge. You know, we had a, we had a building where the people that run it, the engineers that, that, that keep the building going, they're usually a third party company and they staff the engineering group and there'll be like a chief that's an employee of us and then his crew is from the self company and they had to do a layoff and the guy that they laid off had been at that building for like 26 years and he was picked to be the layoff because he was the newest guy. You know, all the other guys. Yeah. Had been there longer and so talking about tribal knowledge, I mean a lot of this stuff is in these guys heads and like they know that machine and this one, you know, they're all, there's five of them but this one is temperamental and that stuff is not captured anywhere, you know. Right. So to, to kind of try to collate that. And that's just one building. To collate that across a portfolio of buildings over a million square feet or whatever. That's, that's an interesting thing that, that we're starting to think about.
• 46:08
  Speaker A: Okay. And that also, you know, thinking about that and thinking about the, the buildings and everything else really makes one of your statements from earlier. Land of the private rental, public network. Yeah. Having to have all of those and set those up and, and, and then also wanting to leverage, I'm sure economies of scale. So if you've got multiple buildings, especially multiple buildings that are within proximity of each other, where you can run fiber in between them or get connectivity between them, you want to leverage that capability.
• 46:43
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean that, that, that would be ideal.
• 46:46
  Speaker A: Yeah. And then I've had people reach out for me to take surveys on like Smart buildings and, and dealing with those kinds of things to, to do what you're talking about, but recognizing the fact that, yeah, many buildings have been there.
• 47:01
  Speaker B: For a while and they're doing lots of things like putting grass on the roofs of the buildings and there's competitions to be, you know, there's like certifications that a building could be lead. You can walk into an office building and there'll be a lead kind of emblem on the front of the building because that, that achieved that certification of being energy efficient.
• 47:21
  Speaker A: Okay, hadn't seen those, but, but I'm out here in the Southwest where we still got lots of room to grow out.
• 47:31
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of companies struggling with people to, with a, you know, because I mean, look, I, I like to work remotely too, but companies and, and, and my company, they want everybody in the office, all their tenants to be, have their, all their people in the office.
• 47:48
  Speaker A: That's where they get the value out of the hospital.
• 47:51
  Speaker B: So then the question is like, what sorts of, what sorts of things can we use to attract the people to come in? You know, that means like putting in the gym or you know, ping pong tables and lounges and roof decks and, and all that kind of stuff so that people want to be there. Like it becomes a cool place to be, you know, so. And all that stuff has technology, either whether it's TV or WI fi or music, you know, it's amazing how different, you know. Yeah. So it's exciting.
• 48:30
  Speaker A: Yeah. All kinds of different challenges. Well, Larry, this has been an awesome conversation. I've really enjoyed our time. Hey, I want to give you a chance to promote anything that you've been doing. So you mentioned something.
• 48:45
  Speaker B: Yep, yep. In my spare time, I am a practitioner of stoicism. I'm a, I'm a stoic and I'm a part of a group called Modern Stoics. And Modern Stoics is a little different than regular stoicism in that there's not as much of a focus on the gods or whatever. When you talk about ancient Stoics like Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, it's more about the, the, the ethics of how to live and how to, how to be a good person and how to make your way in the world and achieve a. What they call a smooth flowing life, which is a. Sometimes translated as happiness, but it's really more satisfaction life. And this group that I'm involved in is called Conversations with Modern Stoicism. And they have a monthly zoom every once a month on a Saturday. And they have a stoic expert to come in and talk about, say, either grief or being fair or journaling things like that. And we have a vibrant WhatsApp community. And it's a lot of fun, and it's. It's definitely informed my professional life as well. And one of the. One of the pieces of stoicism is that you try not to let things bother you that. That are out of your control. And as an IT leader, that's crucial, man. And I run a. Or help to run a book club that. Where we read stoic texts or from either ancient sources or modern sources, and we meet to discuss those books, and it's. It's great fun. How do.
• 50:22
  Speaker A: How do people find you if they want to join that or if they want to learn or see about mentoring?
• 50:29
  Speaker B: Well, there's, you know, they can go to modernstoicism.com and I can send you a link to the conversations group that we're actually having a meeting coming up.
• 50:40
  Speaker A: All right, well, awesome. Thank you very much for your time today.
• 50:43
  Speaker B: Thank you.
• 50:44
  Speaker A: Talking to you, sir.
• 50:45
  Speaker B: You, too. Thanks a lot. Thank you.