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432- AI Should Not Speed Up Broken Work w/ Jesse Crane · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Honestly, I think AI the biggest challenge we have we're going to see is that like people just think let's just, it'll make us do what we're doing faster when in reality we shouldn't be doing that at all. We should be something completely different. So I love how manufacturing does things where they do kaizens and they do like that's the approach we're trying to take is we try to kaizen a lot of stuff. We're trying to use that type of methodology where like let's just see how the process is and then let's figure out what it should be and not just sort of, let's just go in and make it faster doing what it does. But that is human nature.
• 0:38
  Speaker B: After talking with IT leaders, I've come to discover one thing. And it's the same thing, you know, it's the same thing everyone else knows, whether they want to admit it out loud or not. Nothing gets done in any company where without it touching it, nothing. But here's the thing. When everything's on fire, when nothing's working, when the ransomware hits, when the whole business grinds to a halt, it is completely indispensable. You're the most valuable asset in the company. But when everything's running like a well oiled Tesla, you're a line item, a cost center on a spreadsheet. You've done the work, you, you've built the career, you've earned your seat at the executive roundtable. But having a seat at the table is one thing. How much nicer would it be to actually be heard? This is. You've been heard.
• 1:32
  Speaker C: All right. Well it's great to have you with us again on you've been heard where we focus on the real world journey of IT leadership. For those of who already have a seat and those who are working hard to get there, we believe in having authentic discussions about the challenges and growth required to lead modern organizations. Jesse, thank you for joining us today and for sharing your hard earned truth with the you've been heard.com community.
• 1:59
  Speaker A: No, thank you, Mike. I'm really glad to be here.
• 2:02
  Speaker C: Yeah. Today we've got Jesse Crane. With more than 20 years experience navigating complex enterprise environments, A compelling aspect of Jesse's leadership philosophy right now is how he approaches fast moving world of AI. Your recent insights highlight a critical perspective evaluating the data privacy, setting firm corporate guardrails and understanding the infrastructure required for localized AI processing power. Jesse, you've managed to transition from building technical frameworks to driving corporate culture. Flawlessly. I'd love to hear how you did it. Can you kick things off by introducing yourself and sharing your path to the executive table?
• 2:46
  Speaker A: Thanks, Mike. Yeah, enough. Anything's flawless in our world of it. Yeah, I actually have a little different background probably than a lot of folks that came over. Beginning of my career, I started in finance and accounting and in about five or six years in my career I was financial controller of the Indianapolis International Airport. So I was there for Y2K, which was kind of a cool place to be when you hear all these rumors that the planes are going to fall, the sky and the power is going to go off and just the world was going to fall apart. And I was in the world of finance and accounting during that and really fascinating. It really got me interested in technology at that point. It was like, wow, this is really powerful. All Internet was just coming up and it was becoming a really big thing and the dot coms and the startups and there was a lot of exciting things happening.
• 3:29
  Speaker C: Oh, I just want to break in for a second because I wonder how many of those people listening to us know or remember the Y2K problem and what the root of it was and what it was like to be around during that dot com boom where we had what, five different browsers and we didn't have a clue as to all of the websites. There used to be a roulette and you just push a button and it would randomly find a web page and bring it to you. And the Y2K problem of not having enough space in our programming to have a four digit year, so we use two digits. And we were coming to that point of, ooh, is it 1900 or is it 20 something? And that's the Y2K problem. But back into your history, man. Sorry.
• 4:17
  Speaker A: You know, at an airport at that time we were all legacy systems. It was a mainframe. There was one guy that could go in the back and he could run the reports. And I remember he went away for a two weeks vacation and it was, any reports you need to close the books. Like he's going to be gone, so ask him to print it off and then when he comes back you can do the next part of it. And so that was a really fun time that led to us deciding, hey, we probably need to up our game and we actually implement a new ERP system. This is when Oracle ERP was a big deal, probably still is, but it was very expensive. So we did the implementation and that got me experience from the business side, from the customer side. Of how an implementation works. And being that I had that on my resume, I had a friend that moved out to Silicon Valley and said, hey, do you want to come out here and do Oracle implementations for startups? So I moved out to the Bay Area. I never lived out there in my life and went out there thinking California was going to be very laid back and relaxed and palm trees and warm water. And that's not what Silicon valley is. Maybe SoCal, but not NorCal. And I tell you, like of the startups I worked with, there's nobody left. I mean it was all, these were all sort of crazy, crazy ideas that people had. And because they had so much money through funding, it was a big deal to tell your investors, oh yeah, we got Oracle, it's our ERP system. They had five man shops that were trying to bring up companies and they thought they needed Oracle financials. And spoiler alert for anyone that's never worked on the ERP side of the house. You don't need Oracle for that or SAP or any of the big guys you could buy do the QuickBooks. So I did spreadsheet. You got it. So that's what got me to be more of an IT person. It was, I came in with understanding the business side of it. I, I knew the financial side. I started learning how businesses worked, saw the technology side. I was always someone that was very impatient. And what I found on ERP land is there's so many different people to get an answer. If you're just a functional guy and you don't know how to pull the data yourself, you're going to be sitting around forever because you're waiting for the DBA or the sysadmin or the developers. So I started learning how to code a little bit, how to pull data out, how everything works. So I didn't have to rely on someone that may or may not show up at the right time when I need them.
• 6:19
  Speaker C: So Jesse, let me ask you, did you grow up in that culture of hey, don't touch those buttons, because right there you're talking about that mind shift of wait a minute, here I am with Oracle and the ERP and everything. And I guarantee that you, at that point that you're talking about, you started to push the buttons, you're like, what's this do? What's that do? Yeah, it's how you learn these systems. That's how you learn to fish for yourself.
• 6:50
  Speaker B: If your Internet goes down and you're calling carriers yourself, that's not strategic. It, we help teams centralize monitoring proactive tickets and escalation across every location without capex. Less noise, more uptime. Make it boring again. Just go to you've been heard.com and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline and save.
• 7:12
  Speaker A: I will tell you, I might have learned the hard way a few times, but my favorite was at a customer I had that was in Santa Cruz. And I was down there doing some work and I had their production system open and I had a test system open and I was kind of playing around and in the test system I was supposed to open the calendar to sort of see that. Well, in Oracle, that basically updates the database with all the numbers and it kind of starts to close your books. So I did that trying to test something out. And I'm sitting in a cubicle surrounded by tons of other cubicles, and I start hearing people saying, hey, what's going on? Why are the books closed? Anyone know what's going on? And they all start talking to each other and I'm like, yeah, I wonder what's going on? And then I realized, oh, wait a minute, I was in the wrong screen there. That was production. And to get a rollback from Oracle, they wouldn't do that. And so I had to know somebody that was like, deep, deep in the works, that, like, knew a way to get to it. So I'm calling everybody I knew and I finally found somebody that knew this sort of legendary script that they could run to roll back what I had done. And that definitely I learned my lesson there. I'm never having a production and a test system open at the same time.
• 8:19
  Speaker C: Definitely one of the ones that you don't forget.
• 8:21
  Speaker A: No, no. And that's the fun of coming up on it. There's a lot you can learn. And so I did startups for a few years. When I got into it in Silicon Valley, like, everything was a startup. And the company I came to, There was about 200 of us that were doing Oracle ERP consultants. Like, that's how many businesses out there were doing things over time in the two years the bubble burst. And I started seeing them dropped. And so I ended up being one of the last five Oracle ERP consultants we had. And the company closed down. And so it was kind of a went from the excitement of, wow, I get to go every day to see some new company and deal with these great technical challenges and figure out how these businesses work to just barely getting on. Like, I would take on any work they had if they needed three hours of somebody to go out and try to problem solve specific problem. I was on it and I had no ego on this. I just wanted to get by. And it was again, a lot of people had a lot more experience than me and they left or they didn't want the small stuff. So it was another lesson I learned is like, do the small stuff, like take any work that is there. Everything's a learning experience and especially when things are going bad, like do everything you can to keep things going. And that led me to move to Stanford University where I ran applications for five years, which was really a whole other experience time period. This was in, this is about 2003 is when I moved to Stanford. So I got through the startups, I went y2k the startups to University and Stanford. When I got there, they were doing an ERP implementation for Oracle. They were already two years in and they were about six months from go live. And I thought, well, this is going to be easy. Like, wow, we're right at the end of it. They've got it all figured out. And I was one of two Oracle ERP on the financial track. So there's already another one of us, like, how hard can this be? Within about a couple of weeks I realized they didn't have anything ready, they didn't know any of the answers. And from a business standpoint, it was one of the most interesting organizations I've worked for because it was very siloed and Stanford gets a lot of grant money from lots of donors. And what we found is the process when someone wants to give money to Stanford, to getting it over to what they invest in and how they give it to the causes they want to support. It's like three different departments, actually there's four departments and no one knew the next step. So you talk to the first group and you say, well, what happened? Oh, the check comes in, I deposit it, then what happens? I don't know, go talk to this other group. And we would have to go. And it was really interesting to learn that no one really knew how this worked. And just over time it just sort of had built up and it was again another organization just like the AIRPORT that had grown with legacy systems. So you had a bunch of people coding all this in the background. No one really knew what it did and how it worked. So we had to tease apart from the business side, what are you really trying to do? Because most of those coders had retired. This is really old system.
• 11:00
  Speaker C: Yeah. So quick question about this too, because to put this in perspective for the audience you're talking about a siloed organization from the ball is being thrown over the wall and how many knowledge workers or how many people sitting at computers outside of the student base? Because when you talk to departments, you're also talking about colleges with the same sets of departments per college. And then you've got the administration over all of the colleges and their departments. And so I can just think of. I spent a tiny bit of time at a university here in New Mexico, so trying to break through all of those silos at that time. And it wasn't the norm to break through those cultures or to break apart those silos at that point. And they were still embracing siloed culture.
• 11:53
  Speaker A: Oh, absolutely. We were considered a separate.
• 11:55
  Speaker C: That's the user base. That's the thing that I'm trying to ask.
• 11:58
  Speaker A: The internal user base was in the hundreds. We didn't touch the student systems, which was good. But we dealt with grants and accounting. We dealt with finance team, we dealt with the investment team. We dealt with the R and D teams or the grant teams. There were a lot of different groups. And what you would find, it was really interesting that you said about the universities within the university, if we wanted to standardize something. So we're trying to move from processes that were built over years and years to try to standardize. You would go to the School of Engineering and say, all right, guys, talk to the dean. You talk to the leadership team. Hey, we need to make some changes. We're going to start doing things this way. And they would say, wait a minute, do you know who we are? We're the School of Engineering. We bring in this much money. No, no, we don't want to do that. Then you go to School of Medicine and you'd hear the exact same thing. You'd go to all of them. You get to the point, like school of Pottery. Are you going to give us that talk track? It was crazy. The trying to get a distributed user base like that onto standard processes was probably one of the most challenging things I've ever dealt with in my career.
• 12:58
  Speaker C: And actually, I guarantee that that same kind of culture is out there at the universities, at the scholastic entities today. They're still fighting those battles.
• 13:08
  Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. It's a very different leadership style also. They're very collaborative in how they. They make decision making. So it's very different from corporate world. So going from a place where it's very few people made decisions to. Everybody had to agree, and they didn't really have the interest to agree. It was very different.
• 13:23
  Speaker C: Yeah, different. And so you've already touched on one of the common points for IT leadership is understanding the business. So by coming from the accounting side, by coming from that near your experiences in an ERP implementation, you started to understand and really see the business side. And then you started to learn the IT so that you could fish for yourself. Now you move into the siloed, the pure siloed environment. Well, actually, no. Then you go do the startups where you're getting to see the business side from many organizations and then jump into the education side and see the siloed and try to work through instead of the business culture, the education culture, of the collaboration by the common agreement that's needed to implement something across that kind of an environment. And we're still talking the early part of your career.
• 14:21
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no doubt. The next jump I made, I did five years. We went live on Oracle. I got a chance to see a lot of the change management you have to do with that big of a rollout. And it was a lot because of the organization. I decided then I did a little bit more consulting just to kind of get my feet wet again on what else is going out there. And then I jumped over to a company. It's a Fortune 500 company. It's one of the best medical device companies ever that, I mean, it's known for its culture and just how great of a place it is. It's called Stryker Medical Corporation. I knew nothing about medical devices in Silicon Valley. That wasn't the sexy work you want to work for. Google at that time or Facebook was still a hot place coming up. There were a lot of other software companies. So coming to a company that manufactured physical medical devices didn't sound like it was going to be something that I want to do forever. It was close to home. So I liked that I got to stop going up to the city, go up to San Francisco, which was an hour and a half commute every day each way. It was great. I was still at this point consider myself an Oracle ERP guy. And the big aha for me came after we had did some reorgs and my boss ended up moving to a new role where he took on enterprise architecture and he took on middleware and master data and these really just these terms and these things that like I had no idea what they were. I kind of had a general idea and there was a point where I was going to stay in the ERP organization and I had some opportunities to grow there. But I went to my boss and I said, hey, I don't know any of the stuff that you're going to go do, but sounds really interesting and you're a great guy to work for. Do you have any chance. And he's. Yeah, absolutely. So he gave me Master Data Management, which all of a sudden I went from being an Oracle ERP guy to someone that's relatively agnostic. I didn't really care where the data came from we had at Stryker. This was also a global role. From when I started Stryker, it was a divisional. I got to see every ERP we had. At the time it was probably 70 ERPs and multiple versions of 7 0. Yes. Stryker grew through acquisitions. So every time they acquired a company, you would usually have a commercial ERP system they sold out of. And then very often you'd have multiple manufacturing sites that would have really watered down versions of either what they were using or some just manufacturing software. So I got a chance to learn of things. Ask Manman Qad was one of the ones that came up SAP, of course, other versions of Oracle, all different versions. It was really, really interesting. And each of these systems, again, they had grown their own ways. They had their own data. That was over time, they all treated, they sold the similar customers, but they had different ways that they recognized the customer information. So being able to match things up to, say, across these 70erps, what is Kaiser Permanente? It meant different things to different people. So you couldn't get a good view of what all that was. So that was that challenge right there.
• 17:03
  Speaker C: I mean, that. I don't know that the audience understands how big that was to. Because even just the employee information, the way that the personal information for each employee is stored amongst 70 different systems.
• 17:18
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 17:19
  Speaker C: You'd be amazed how many different ways we keep first name, last name, middle name.
• 17:25
  Speaker A: Absolutely.
• 17:26
  Speaker C: And then like in the us, we've got the Social Security. There's other. I'm sure since it's international, there's all kinds of different employee numbers or citizen numbers or. I don't even know. I've spent my whole career working with us, but I can just imagine trying to get. Trying to get a holistic list of every employee, let alone every customer amongst those 70 systems. Yeah, yeah, that's a challenge.
• 17:57
  Speaker A: It was a lot, but it was again, it was like an education. Was like going for your mba. I got to see all of this. I got to learn about the product data. That product, honestly, product was probably the most complicated of the domains because we would manufacture a product in a division in the us, Although the plant might be in Mexico, but we sold it in Australia and Japan and each of them had a different system that they were selling it with. And there was a lot of different information that need to be there. There's regulatory requirements around the data. So it was able to translate all this. And this was at a time when the organization was growing. I got there, it was like an $8 billion company. Now it's a 32 billion. So I got to see us go from 8 to 32. And all of that growth pains eventually went to. Let's move over to one erp. Great idea. Let's. Spoiler alert. They're not quite all the way done there, but a lot of work. So we had to figure out how do you sort of do all this. So, yeah, again, you pull all the data, you get a master data system where you would normalize it. So a lot of matching algorithms is early AI. I mean, this is really. You're looking for patterns and you're looking for what do these things have in common? Yes, correct. Correct. So, so we, we did some basic versions of that one and we got by and it was painful. And anytime we brought up a new, hey, we're going to move our CRM system from the time it was Siebel, we're going to go to Salesforce, you would see the amount of work to try to have to report things and have it look the right way. It was not small work.
• 19:20
  Speaker C: Yeah. If you had 70 erps, you potentially had 70 or more CRMs.
• 19:27
  Speaker A: Yeah. Good news. We didn't have that many CRMs. We did a lot of PLMs. We had a lot of CRMs. A lot of. You name the Alphabet. So it was like the Noah's ark of applications.
• 19:37
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 19:37
  Speaker C: HRMs. Yes.
• 19:39
  Speaker A: You got it, you got it. So I did that for a while. I did a little bit of middleware in there. So again, that was another agnostic where I had to learn how to move the data from one place to another. And in that one, I used to joke, somewhere in the world, because we're a global company, someone was complaining that the data wasn't right, that either came in from the wrong place. It didn't come in, it didn't go out. We were just nonstop. Luckily, I wasn't an operational role. I had a partner that did that, but just sort of watching the amount of escalations at all times of the day, talking to China at night and then India in the morning or Europe in the morning and us. And it was a really interesting challenge. And it honestly, like, that probably is One I considered myself, all right? I'm an IT guy. Like, if I'm dealing with a call in India at 2 in the morning, like, okay, I've got my chops now. Now I'm it.
• 20:25
  Speaker C: Yeah, well, interesting, because as soon as you were working with Oracle and doing anything more than data entry into Oracle and consuming the reports, I was already thinking you were it then.
• 20:35
  Speaker A: Yeah, the.
• 20:36
  Speaker C: You were doing that, consulting. You were it. But yeah, for the imposter syndrome was gone by the time you're doing this. Correct.
• 20:43
  Speaker A: Cause there was no time to have it. You were underwater just when you start the day. So if you overthink things and you're not accepting it, you just gotta be in there. This is also where I learned. I'm a learner. So I was in my element. This is when I hadn't realized it up until this point of how much I enjoyed learning new things. And every new project that was thrown, every new challenge, every new obstacle, it was like, crap. We could solve things every day.
• 21:08
  Speaker C: So you've got that other fundamental IT thing of a puzzle solver or a problem solver or. Give me the mystery, I'll figure it out. There's a way to get this done. All we need is time, imagination and money.
• 21:22
  Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. That was really great. I did all of that for a couple years. That was about three or four years. And then really the big change and the one that really kind of got me on the path that I'm on now is I was offered the opportunity. I could have stayed in Middleware and Master Data Management was another reorg work for a big company. Got used to these ones or. My boss actually came to me one day and he said, you know what, I know you want to stay there, but I'm moving over to this business partner organization. And good news is you're coming with me. And I said, well, Kevin, do I have a say in that? He goes, not really. I've already made some trades, so you're coming with me. And that was previously, Yes. I dealt with the business, I dealt a lot with the finance leadership team. I knew them really well. I knew parts of the organization. This. All of a sudden, I was responsible for the whole organization. Like I was dealing with leadership. It was no longer the low level projects or support, it was strategy. I have to know what we're doing across all these different towers in this division. I have to know what's our strategy on CRM, what's our strategy around, how are we going to deal with product lifecycle management, how do we deal with this is pre AI. So we didn't really have that. But this was. Cloud was becoming a thing. We're starting to move stuff off prem. There was a big push. We actually were in Northern California. California. And there was a big fire during the time that I was there that was close by that shut the plant down and luckily we had actually the week before moved our ERP system up in the cloud so we didn't have any damage. But if it had wiped us out we could have gone on. We would have had the resilience. Really wouldn't have noticed at least that part of it wouldn't have noticed it. So these were things I didn't think about when I was doing middleware or master data or even erp. So it was really, really interesting. And I was a business partner. They moved me down here to Texas. I'm in Flower Mound, Texas. Moved me down to actually own a site. And this site was a challenge. It was the most complicated business in all of Stryker. Not the most profitable, not the biggest, but definitely the most complicated hundred percent configurable product line they built. They had an acquisition of a competing product and they were trying to integrate the two. Struggling with that. They had two salesforces selling basically competing products. They want to get them on one CRM, consolidate the products down. We're building a brand new facility here in Flower Mound from, from scratch. They had a site in Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina. They had to close that. A lot of craziness going on there and we had to redesign the whole business. We had to do it in basically a couple of years and so sounded like a great challenge. I moved down here. It was honestly not a day went by that there wasn't something crazy going on. And again as I came from very, very comfortable talking ERP and talking some of that side of the business. Now I'm learning about or building a brand new building like well what do we have to consider about that cabling and where are we going to put
• 24:06
  Speaker C: the closet cameras and yeah all of the ICs and so now true infrastructure and not to mention, okay, cloud starting. So then VoIP is involved and then the WI fi is becoming much more stable and more readily used as the primary networking connectivity or the backbone for a lot of things, especially in a manufacturing place so that you've got the room on the floor to change, move things around because you can't move equipment if you're stuck to a outlet in a wall or in the floor.
• 24:41
  Speaker A: Yeah. And now I think everyone takes it for granted if you're at a corporate site, but we actually were the first one in the organization to move over to Skype for our phones. So it was like, are you sure this is going to work? You're going to be talking on headsets and not having a physical phone, not ordering physical phones. There were a couple of leaders that just like, no, no, I want my physical phone. So we had to get those set up. And yes, early Skype, if you remember, the experience of that was not a fun thing.
• 25:09
  Speaker C: I also remember telling Cisco, hey, why do I want to pay you that much per person when I can just go to Skype for this and.
• 25:21
  Speaker A: And I get video. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, absolutely.
• 25:26
  Speaker C: But yeah, that's like 2015, 2017, talking those time periods when Skype was coming in.
• 25:32
  Speaker A: Correct.
• 25:32
  Speaker C: And what did they switched it from Skype to Link. And then a lot more of the unified communications, all of those guys came into play around that time, too. Skype was like the leader of it or the trailblazer.
• 25:48
  Speaker A: And anyone that was doing business partnering in that time of the world, the one thing you talk to, like, first thing you say, hey, how's it going with your business? What's going on? Everyone complained. Conference rooms, and I mean, there's still. Conferences are challenging. But then it was particularly because you had new. The AV scene was changing significantly, and we didn't have standardized AV across any of the sites. Even within the site, you had different things in there. You had Skype coming in, so you had that element of it. There was so many things. And my job almost became, for a period, 75% of dealing with unhappy customers, especially leadership. Hey, my call went bad. There's a million reasons why that could be. A lot of it had to do with equipment they had, but yet it was a lot of telecom and a lot more than I ever wanted to know about.
• 26:31
  Speaker C: And then the fun of having a third party in that conference room and you need to be able to switch from the internal network to the hostile network that you'd let the third party use. So you put that on your guest network and then they need to be. Be showing you stuff or interacting with your systems that are on the internal network. That always made conference rooms a challenge.
• 26:54
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 26:56
  Speaker C: You're bringing back so many different memories, dude.
• 27:00
  Speaker A: So that was a division, and we were probably about a $300 million division. So for Stryker, that was really nothing. My boss left. He owned the whole business partnering for the division, which was a $2 billion division. So I got promoted up for that and it was really exciting. And this is when I really learned about it's place in where we want to be versus where maybe people think we are. My reputation was great. I came down to a division that a business unit that had a lot of challenges. I fixed a lot of them. Great reputation. I knew everybody at the corporate level. I knew everybody at the other divisions. I was very hands on everything. So when my name was announced, the CFO was excited, the operations VP was excited, the quality compliance, everybody loved it. I didn't know our divisional president that well, but we knew of each other. And I thought, great. I came out of his division, this guy's going to love me. I can speak their business. I know I sit in on all of the earnings calls. I know what their quotas are. I know a lot about the business. I'm really geeked on this. And first time I go meet with them, when I'd been announced in there, I was in their building in Northern California. I went back there to visit and I went to his office and I'm giving him my pitch about why as a business partner, we're a global corporation. It is very complicated, dedicated, and it's really hard. There's a lot of red tape. There's a lot of administrative work. I know how to get that done. And he knows my track record from what I had done under his business unit. So he's nodding along. I say, look, as business partner, I can help you if you get me involved with the strategic initiatives up front. And he's nodding along and I'm thinking, I got him. This is, this speech has worked on everyone I've ever given. And I think this is great. And he goes, yeah, yeah, it's great. That's exactly what I wanted to hear. Okay, awesome. Okay, so what's the area you want me to lean into first? And he goes, you know what, I have an idea. He goes, let's get, get up. So I'm thinking, we're going to the cfo. I think we're going to the business transformation. Maybe there's an acquisition. I'm going to find out. I'm ready to sign the NDA. Ah, you know the story. I walk out of his office with him. He stops as his administrative assistant. He goes, julie, what's that problem you've been having with the printer Jesse's here to help you with?
• 29:00
  Speaker C: Just guessing, man.
• 29:03
  Speaker A: That was when my ego went from I was on top of the world down to, wow, this is what they think of me. Like all this time in There, everything I've shown. I've been involved with heavily strategic initiatives. I helped them get through acquisitions, I helped them get through reorganizations. I've helped with product launches, all these things. And I'm the printer guy. So to make things worse, I thought that was the highlight of the day or low light. I go back to my office and there is a leadership meeting. The leadership team is meeting. This is the first time that I am the IT person for that leadership meeting where I'm a member of that. So previous, as a business unit, they treated me. I had full voting rights if there was a business decision. They treated me at the business unit level as like, hey, I'm a real adult. I can make decisions. So this one, I am not really sure if I'm supposed to go in the room with them or not. I have the link, so I just call in from the office. I think, you know what? I'm going to be conservative the first time. I don't want to be assumptive that they want me there. And I'm listening to them talk, they're talking about stuff. And all of a sudden I get a text, and it's from the divisional president. And I read it really fast. And as I read it, I read it as, hey, really want you in the room. You're here in the building. You should come join us. So I'm all excited. I'm texting my old boss saying, look, they saw I wasn't there and they felt I should be part of this. So they called me in there. I get in the room, I go sit down. I'm smiling at everybody, and they're talking away, and I'm like, I want to look at this text again. Because this makes me. I'm going to like, frame this text. I re look at it. No, that's not what he said. What he said that I had to looked over was, Jesse, you're not in here. The AV equipment is not working. You need to get in here right now and figure out what's going on. Somehow I miss all of the bad stuff in that one. Thought it was just welcome. So now I'm starting to realize, oh, I'm a little too comfortable looking. Just sitting here watching all this. What do I do? Moments later, seconds later, the VP of sales, who again, I'd known for years from my previous role, who I thought was my guy, he gets up from his seat across me, walks around the table. I think I'm getting the bro hug, or like he's congratulating me for being Here. I don't know why I haven't figured out the storyline yet, but he leans into me and he goes, jesse. And I won't use the exact words that he used because a little bit more profane. But he's, what the heck is going on with the sales reporting? It's been down all morning since 6am so now I'm sitting there, I've got the president who thinks that my role is to fix the av, that that's why I got called in. And then the VP of sales telling me, hey, why is our sales system down? So I tail between, definitely between the legs, got up and left the room and realized, yeah, I'm the guy that they're going to call when something doesn't work. They don't view me as the guy to bring in when they want to get it to work from the front. And that really colored the way that I looked at things going forward for the rest of my time in the business partner Org. And it was, it was a struggle in a big division where a lot of the old school leadership thought it was an order taker. That's what you were there for. They will call you when it's your time to talk. And we had a run of conference room issues and I got punished because the president said, yeah, we're not fixing these fast enough. Equipment's all crap. We're trying to get the budget to pay for this, but it's not. Got to work with me a little bit here. And he basically said, yeah, I don't want you to come give updates anymore. You can come once a quarter instead of once a month. And that was his punishment to me because he felt I didn't fix his conference room quick enough, much less yet
• 32:16
  Speaker C: he wouldn't give you the budget to fix.
• 32:17
  Speaker A: Correct. Correct.
• 32:19
  Speaker C: And. And it's all your fault.
• 32:21
  Speaker A: Correct. Correct. So that was the most in terms of maturity of like really growing and seeing like, okay, if I had to do this all over again, what would I do differently? And that's really where I, I spent a lot of time thinking, going from a small business unit up to a large division. There were some ways I should have been more formal. There was some ways I should have approached some of these things. There's a lot of things I could do differently. But the key thing in there for me is I didn't get a chance to show them upfront that I knew the business. And I, I think if I went at it differently and I came in and I was stronger on, okay, I've Been looking at kind of how we're rolling out these product lines. And I see kind of the sales guys are struggling with the inventory field, inventory management here. I'd like to go ahead and start to work with the team to redesign the flow. And I've got some ideas. Like I had some things in my bag that I could have gotten to, but I thought I'd get to it eventually. I thought I was already made man. I came in from the business unit.
• 33:11
  Speaker C: So let me hit you up on this a little bit because this is a critical growth point for those that are following behind us and those that find themselves today in the organizations. Because there's so many IT people that find themselves being that order taker that they can't. And they can't break from being the order taker into this leadership, this executive piece that you're talking about, this seat at the table, to having been heard. And so how did you end up getting. Changing that because you had been the made band, now you're back to an order taker. You're not happy about it and, and obviously you've made it back to being a made man. Air quotes around all of this. So talk to me what you do to help make that happen. Once you got that real gut punch of, oh, this is what they think of it.
• 34:04
  Speaker A: Yeah. So I had some advocates on the leadership team. Again. I knew the corporate, I knew the CFO really well. He was a big advocate for me. So I started just saying, all right, I mean, I'm not going to overnight turn the president. And he had his opinions. And so I started really focusing on what can I do to make the CFO's world better. How can I look for other areas? At this time, our organization was also starting to standardize going to one ERP system across everybody. So being able to start to influence the direction that some of these global initiatives are going as an advocate for my division, that's where I shifted my attention because I knew if I could help be a bigger player in some of these larger organization because my divisional president had no say, we $2 billion, we weren't the big dog. There was bigger ones out there that were going to really focus on how we designed the erp. But if I was able to influence it through my relationships and through the ability to really know our business, be able to get, get it made there. And that's what I did. I focused a lot on those bigger corporate initiatives and really pushing our interests there.
• 35:03
  Speaker C: And it.
• 35:04
  Speaker A: And it did work out. It really did help me I did start to get credit for some of the wins we got. We were able to move to a new field inventory solution, and we did that right before we were on a legacy field inventory solution. It was two weeks before end of the year, heaviest time of the year for this specific business. And basically they went out of business. This was actually during COVID time. So the guy just said, hey, you know, Covid, what you going to do? I'm closing the books. We're going to leave your server up for a while. So eventually, probably they're going to shut the power on it and you can't use it. But we had to rush to get something built to replace that. So it was things like that. I'm going to go out and just make a name for myself. I'm going to go find where the problems are. And, yeah, I ended up doing two more years in that role, and it really did help grow me. And it led to the next challenge that I went after. Before I left the organization, I did two years in cybersecurity, and I felt like it was a great jump because cybersecurity is another one where, like, well, they don't. No one really wants to listen to cybersecurity guy. Like, you're there to say no to them on all the crazy stuff they want to do. So having already been in a position where, like, I know how these people think, I know what they think of it. Now I get to start to think about, well, how can I help defend this in a way and sell them on what we're doing with cyber? So it was a really nice transition. It was also sort of that final piece, I felt to kind of get the whole picture of how it works
• 36:21
  Speaker C: when you jumped into cyber. Because I'm thinking back to the particular time that we're talking about. This is at the SolarWinds.
• 36:28
  Speaker A: Correct.
• 36:29
  Speaker C: That was worldwide. And you guys were probably a large enough target that they were paying attention to you.
• 36:35
  Speaker A: I jumped over right after SolarWinds, so that was something that they were talking about quite a lot. That was a campfire story that we would talk about of things that could happen. Yeah. My intro to Sager was in my building, my plant down in Flower Mound. I got a call from the ciso and he said, hey, Jesse, like, close your door. Oh, so I close my door. He goes in your building somewhere. We've picked up a robot, a little toy robots, a Chinese dinosaur robot, and it's broadcasting something back. We picked up the signals on there. You got to go find it. But you can't let anyone know that you're what you're looking for. Because we don't know if it's are people that are doing something, if it's something internal or if it's something. Someone went to China and brought it back. Didn't know. So I had to get my death side, guys. And we had to like, we call it Jurassic Park. We're going on the dinosaur hunt. Looking for the dinosaur. And crazy enough, we'd never found him. The signals went away. So it could be someone came back from vacation and brought something in and just left at their desk and then end of the day, left. We never found the dinosaur. But that was my intro to cyber in my division. And from there it was a lot of stuff. And so wait a minute.
• 37:37
  Speaker C: Your CISO had equipment around for anonymous radio signals?
• 37:44
  Speaker A: There was something they picked up. It was going to our network. It wasn't radio signals. It was actually going through. It was connected to our WI fi. But there was something about the IP or there was something that they were catching what it was broadcasting. They recognized the device as something malicious. Usually we pick up things like people bring in their game council and they're setting that up to play, or you find some oddball things that people are doing there. But this is the first time where it was like, drop everything, go look for the dinosaur. Wow.
• 38:08
  Speaker C: Okay. Interesting.
• 38:11
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 38:11
  Speaker C: There's a story that's definitely one of those ones where you can you break in and talk about something different? Okay. Never found it. All right. Still doing cyber security or early 20s?
• 38:23
  Speaker A: Yep. I did cyber for a couple of years. It was a great experience. I dealt with some pretty serious certs that we had. So I got to see how our cybersecurity group was top notch. And these are people that came from FBI, that came from military, and they had processes that were, I mean, amazing. I'm still impressed with everything that we had on there. And that kind of, again, filled it out. And at that point I realized I love cybersecurity. I could keep doing that forever, but I really would love, now that I've got the full. The full bucket of experience, I'd love to go run the show myself. And so I started looking around. I kind of narrowed it down. I wanted to stay in medical devices. I think it's a really meaningful industry to be in. I wanted something that was local. I'm in Texas at the time, and I want something that I could build my own organization. And so I found the company I'm with now, Argy Medical. They Are. They're close by. I am VP of it. I sit on the leadership team. And having gone through the experience of being a business partner and kind of seeing what it's like to not be treated as part of the leadership team, I knew what to look for. So as I interviewed with different companies, I was on the lookout for who's going to treat me as. I've got full voting rights, I've got the ability to speak up in a meeting and they're not going to say, no, no, no, no, be quiet. You're the kid.
• 39:34
  Speaker C: The protector's got a problem.
• 39:36
  Speaker A: Yeah, correct, Correct. And they checked all those boxes and there's a lot of work we need to do in it. I've had to do a lot of reorganization of my org there. We've got both. Technology was underinvested in the people were under invested in. We had some people that skills at really weren't what we needed. We didn't have anyone that did any of the new technology. So when I talk about AI, a lot of them were just. They knew less than just the regular person on the street. So I had to go look for somebody like, all right, I need someone who's younger. I need someone that comes up with the. Not the legacy technologies, but I need somebody that is digital native. Someone that came up and grew up on their cell phone, that grew up so looking to balance out and not just have. I had a very, very experienced team, which is great and that's awesome. Except they didn't know all these new technologies and they weren't really excited about getting to do them. So it's been a great experience.
• 40:29
  Speaker C: Yes.
• 40:29
  Speaker A: I went from a place where I had a very large budget again, a big corporate, big Fortune 500 company. Just I have a very tiny budget and I being a former finance guy, this really was an exciting opportunity for me. I wanted to be able to manage my budget. I didn't want to be able to throw money at if we made a mistake. I wanted to be able to prove that we knew how to use money that we were given. And then if I want more money, I can get it. I work for the cfo. She's great, she's tough. She will push me and make sure that we really need the money. But if I need it, she believes in what we're doing. So it's been a really good experience and it kind of puts all those experiences I got together now to where I'm at.
• 41:05
  Speaker C: Okay, so I started off the intro talking about some of the recent posts that you've put out there about AI. So talk to me about what's happening with AI in your world within Argonne Medical. So we're not necessarily Argon Medical, but just AI.
• 41:21
  Speaker A: We don't have a digital product. Our product is physical. We do catheters, we do biopsy devices, we do needles. Yeah. So these are tools that make or break people's lives. And so it's a very important role. We have an older plant. This company's been around since 1972 and a lot of the equipment is older. So when I came in as a security professional, the first thing I worried about was, all right, we have old plants. What's the ot? What are we connecting to the Internet for? Well, I got to worry about that. We don't really have have a big OT presence there. It's a lot of really, really old manual processes. So AI is going to play. Yes, AI is going to play a very, very big role for us in terms of efficiencies out there. Because any process we have right now is very manual, from taking the orders to how they manufacture stuff to you name it. A lot of stuff they do around post market where they're getting data about how the products do out in the field. All that is very manual. So we have a lot to work with. I don't have a large budget, so I have to be very intentional about what I choose to invest in. We're a Microsoft shop, so we try to get the most out of the E5 licenses. I don't believe the hype always of what they say. I'm cautiously optimistic about Cowork. I'm starting to hear good things about that. I've had some peers, CIOs starting to say that they're starting to use it for different productivity cases. Typically our role. We're not going to make anything. We're not building our own LLM. There's no purpose for that. I don't have a big enough team, couldn't afford if I wanted to. A lot of what I do is I'm looking for tools with my partners. What do you guys have? So for our ERP system, what do they have in there already embedded? What does our CRM system have in there? We're looking at a fabric so we can for the data warehouse. So like we're trying to take advantage of stuff that already exists. We're not looking to reinvent anything. And we sprinkle in what we have with Copilot for productivity. We're moving along. I can't Take the risk of jumping too deep in anything too crazy just because it'll suck up my budget. What I worry about is just long term. A lot of stuff. These vendors, they offer it free up front or they want to get you hooked on it. And then they start. Once the tokenization starts getting in there, then it's, we're going to see everything skyrocket. Just like cloud, right? A lot of the problem with cloud was it felt a little bit more cost effective until, like, you're on it for a while and you realize, wow, you're paying more than if you had just hosted it locally. So that's kind of our strategy right now. The other thing that coming in from the cyber background, one of my fears is always just the data itself. And the more you open up AI internally, there's an assumption that you know where your data's at and that is protected and you don't have the spreadsheet with everybody's salary on it, sitting on some team site that they didn't manage to lock down. So I'm probably a little bit more cautious about that than maybe some of my peers are, just because from working in a very large organization, I have all kinds of stories that I can't tell on this about what people will put in places that they don't think about. So a lot of what I'm doing for my strategy, it's partnering my cyber strategy, and I've got a pretty small cyber team, but trying to partner them with what we're doing on the AI front so that we, we're, we're in lockstep. We're not waiting for AI, but at the same time, we're building the governance and making sure that we have the data protected so that we don't get any surprises that we could have avoided with a little bit of foresight, man.
• 44:34
  Speaker C: So, all right, so where's your master data management? Where's your data governance? Where's your cybersecurity at at this point or just in general, what are the challenges that you're facing there?
• 44:45
  Speaker A: Every one of them I'd say. Cyber I'm most comfortable with. I have a really great director and he has done a ton of work to really, really fortify our security. And he's just a great guy. I mean, we talk daily about just different things we're doing. So cyber I'm excited about. We started with a lot of tools and I think this is pretty common with most companies. You end up with all these tools because there's so much hype. Out there and then you end up doing half the installation and you're on to the next thing. And so you end up with a bunch of tools that aren't really doing anything. So we have consolidated down and we are using what we have. So I'm excited about where we are there. That gets into DLP also. So the data loss prevention and really making sure that the sensitive data is locked down that can't be exfiltrated. So kind of that's our big priority in that space. Master data. Overall, again, the good news on the company I'm at now is I don't have 70 erps. So when I hear our problems, I'm able to kind of laugh and say, oh yeah, okay, great, we have one ERP that I got to figure out what to do with the data. I can handle that. A lot of our challenges on the data front, and I think it's under. People talk about it enough, is there's a strong component of the processes and how you're using the ERP with what the data output is. And for a long time our business has been not really trained in how to use a system. And this is one of the great things about it, people. We love to solve problems and we're really smart. We can do all kinds of clever things, but we can be too smart. And so over time, we have customized our ERP to the point where it doesn't really do what it out of the box should do. So that ends up where you really pay for it is a data fraud because you're not capturing the data where it should be. It's not normalized, it's dirty. And so we're doing a lot of cleanup of trying to tease back as we're building out better processes, how do we clean the data in that? So that's a lot of work right there.
• 46:27
  Speaker C: And that itself, I mean, I assume that those processes that you're working on and rebuilding, you're focused in on the current way those processes are being done and refining those processes today and trying to make those as efficient and clean as possible today. Correct.
• 46:49
  Speaker A: A lot of processes we want to start from scratch. We're trying, like in some cases it's easier just to say, that's great, you guys are doing it that way, we're going to do it this way. And this is what the output looks like where we can. We're trying to do that.
• 47:02
  Speaker C: Yeah. And so one of the things that I've recognized and that's coming to us as it and as these roles when we start leveraging AI, we need to really look at those processes again, because it could be a radically different process when we've got the humans doing it, when we've got the humans watching an agent do it, when we've taken agents watching agents to do it, those whole. All three of those are radically different processes.
• 47:30
  Speaker A: 100% same thing. Honestly, I think AI, the biggest challenge we have and we're going to see is that people just think, let's just. It'll make us do what we're doing faster, when in reality we shouldn't be doing that at all. We should be something completely different. So I love how manufacturing does things where they do kaizens and they do like, that's the approach we're trying to take is we try to Kaizen a lot of stuff. We're trying to use that type of methodology where like, let's just see how the process is and then let's figure out what it should be. And not just sort of, let's just go in and make it faster doing what it does. But that is human nature. It's like, hey, we can make these guys faster with. Right. Just doing this, man.
• 48:07
  Speaker C: Okay, so back to the culture and trying to break through things, understanding the business and then the radical shift that you just mentioned right there of, hey, maybe we shouldn't be doing this this way, people not liking change and then just completely upending that world. At least all kinds of new cons conversations.
• 48:30
  Speaker A: I. I think the benefit we have a lot of the areas that. That are going to be impacted most with what the changes need to be made and how we need to automate. They've been beat up for so long. Like there's all kinds of issues if you're not automated and you're dealing a lot of manual processes there. There's a lot of overhead that comes with that. And there's a lot of things that go wrong and they do go wrong. And all these people get beat up. You're not getting your orders out on time. There's. People aren't gonna be happy about that.
• 48:54
  Speaker C: Processing the invoices fast enough, you're not getting the orders out, you're not collecting the money. You got too many people doing too much and we're not seeing enough.
• 49:03
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So when you can go to that group and you say, hey, we can make this better. We can help you solve this, you got to go and say, we want to help you win. And it's not we're here to replace you or we're Here to just change stuff. We're here to help you win. And most people want to win. I mean, there are some people that don't care, but a lot of people do, and especially they've been beat up. So I think it's a really exciting opportunity because you do see people light up when all of a sudden they're getting a lot of attention, like they know things aren't working the way they should or they're not as productive. They're having these issues like they want to solve it. And now all of a sudden, they're getting a lot of resources thrown at them and a lot of opportunity. Again, as long as we treat it as we're winning together. I think people generally like that.
• 49:42
  Speaker C: Yeah. So I find myself at the center of a lot of those same opportunities. And the thing that I love at the current organization is that they're looking to ideas that one of the values of it has flipped and they're looking to us to help them win. Yeah. Are you experiencing the same thing? You're. They're pulling from you. They're looking at you going, please, please make this better.
• 50:06
  Speaker A: When I got Argonne, I. I think they had gotten used to the fact that it. We're pretty small teams, so I think they were turned away enough where they thought, like, why even bother? They're not. They're not gonna. And the ones that did come to us said, this is how I want it to be done. I want you to. You. We want to use this software to do this thing. Well, why do you want to use this software? What are you trying to do? Doesn't matter. That's what we want to do. And I think legacy wise, we sort of own. Okay, you know what you're doing. We don't know. We're not business process experts. That's changed. Definitely. They're coming to us. We're getting invited to the Kaizens. They're looking for us to participate where. They're looking for us to help give guidance. We're bringing in things that. I've got an applications director who worked with me at Stryker, and he's bringing in best practices from Stryker saying, like, hey, visual software, if we want to be on the sales side, if we want to compete with some of these bigger companies, this is what we should be giving our sales folks that he is advocating for them. And they feel it. They definitely feel it. So we are getting invited to the table. And yeah, it's not all at once. It's little bits and pieces or some areas that I wish we were a little bit deeper in. But honestly, I will definitely take the wins we're getting right now.
• 51:12
  Speaker C: Jesse, I'm really enjoying this conversation. I could keep talking. However, the day is the day and we got to keep moving through things. I promised you a question and that is make a prediction for me. What will we as peers be talking about in 18 months that we're not talking about today?
• 51:32
  Speaker A: So, I mean, AI is the buzz is all the great stuff on AI or if it's going to take our jobs? I think there's a lot of talk. The cost of AI, I think, is not as talked about as much as it should be because they're still figuring it out. And the whole concept of tokens and how do you measure if you want to release an agent, what is that going to cost? How can you mathematically figure out what the cost of anything you're doing is? We don't know that. So sooner or later we're going to start feeling the effects of it. Most likely it's going to be more costly than people are expecting. So I do think we're going to start to feel that as we start to throw more out and use agents for more day to day. I definitely feel that's a big one that's coming.
• 52:10
  Speaker C: Yeah. And I had somebody else and tell me about. Hey, think about this too. Right now, every one of those major agentic companies or LLMs or everything, they're being subsidized by investment money today.
• 52:26
  Speaker A: Absolutely.
• 52:27
  Speaker C: The cost of tokens is down compared to what it's ultimately going to be once all of that investment money disappears and now they have to pay their way.
• 52:37
  Speaker A: Absolutely.
• 52:38
  Speaker C: I think you're dead on with that prediction that because that investment capital is going to dry up. And I think that's what I'm hearing is our AI bubble. It's going to be this change in cost. And once we realize that. Yeah. Oh, man. So, Jesse, so truly, thank you for your time today, your experience and sharing that with us. What an amazing journey. Got any last thoughts?
• 53:06
  Speaker A: I appreciate it. Thanks, Mike. It's been a great journey. It's a really exciting industry to be in. We get the best of everybody. We get the learners, we get the problem solvers, we get. I mean, it's a privilege to be able to do this. I work for a medical device company in it. Like, I don't know what's better than that. Like, we have the ability to actually affect people's lives and make it better. Every day I wake up, I'm grateful. There's a lot of other things I can be doing right now and it's a great space to be in. And having gone through all those different points in time over just the last 20 year period, all these different big things like, it's great to see what comes next. They make everything sound scary. Y2K was very scary at the time we were going through it and we don't really talk about that now, so it'll be fun to see where we end up. And again, I'm a pretty optimistic person, so I look forward to it.
• 53:48
  Speaker C: It's amazing how fast things are moving right now. It's staggering. It's eye opening and it's some fun problems to solve or interesting problems to noodle on. Because I don't have all of the solutions today and I don't think you have all the solutions yet either. And we're all trying to figure it all out and the challenges and the opportunities abound right now.
• 54:13
  Speaker A: Yeah, in.
• 54:14
  Speaker C: In a way that I haven't seen for a while, for sure. All right, well, thank you very much for your time today, sir. If you enjoyed today's podcast, please remember to leave a comment. Leave a Like, share the podcast from wherever you're picking us up on and please let us know how we're doing and head over to the you've been heard.com community and join us. There's more of these discussions happening. We're having round tables about AI and all of the things, so please join us and help us and we'll help you. Thank you very much for listening to you've Been Heard.