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448- The Examined Leader Retires the Old Playbook w/Rajvir Madan · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: At times your brain can almost be manipulated consciously or subconsciously to focus on a pattern that you have seen before. Right. And as leaders, often what we do is we walk into organizations and we try to apply a previous pattern to that new organization without sort of recognizing that the new organization that we're in has a completely different context. We think that an old pattern can work in a new environment, let's say. Right. So what works for Lockheed Martin is not going to be what works for SpaceX for instance. Right. Two very different contexts. So our brain has this tendency to sort of go on autopilot and take previous patterns and start to apply them even though the context is very different. And this is one of the tools that I think about quite often, which is, is the previous pattern, is the previous playbook really applicable in the context that I'm in? And if it's not, don't apply it.
• 1:11
  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. What, whether they want to admit it out loud or not, nothing gets done in any company 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'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. Welcome to you've been heard. You've been on the show before, but what's the update in your life? What has changed in, I don't know, however long it's been? A year, two years. Let's just go down how much can change in someone's life in a couple years?
• 2:18
  Speaker A: Yeah. So first of all, you got to start with the family man. So the kids are growing up and I took a trip to India with my 8 year old earlier this year. It was fantastic to get him to experience the culture in India, get him to meet the extended family. I think that was awesome.
• 2:34
  Speaker B: So he got completely taken care of the entire time he was there and got to see literally another world. How does the culture differ from just from a business culture? Just Curious here and India or it doesn't even have to just be business. You've seen both sides. So what's profound to you or what do you see that's different? I mean, obviously a lot of things are the same. We're all humans everywhere. And that's probably one of the first things that people realize. But what's different?
• 3:03
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think what's different is from a business culture perspective, I would say that the American culture, the American business culture tends to be extremely direct and at least in my opinion, I think it's extremely direct and feedback is welcome in most sort of settings that I've been in. I would say that it's completely okay to have that debate, to have that dialogue, to have that discussion before you sort of get to an important decision. And I find the Indian business culture to be extremely hospitable. I don't know if you've ever travel to India and it's a very hospitable culture. It's a very sort of community based culture, for instance, and that has its implications on how you deal in a business context there.
• 3:46
  Speaker B: I haven't traveled to India. I have many friends from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Morocco, all of the Middle East. And what I've noticed, and I don't know if there's any parallels to this that I've noticed when you get outside of the United States, depending on what country you're in, there's definitely more, I don't know if I want to say political decisions that come into play or a lot more of kind of who you know, matters. I think competency matters. I think degrees, I think people in foreign countries tend to be very degree heavy. I think that matters a lot more in America. I think degrees matter, but I think competition, competency and your ability to do something and more prove it by the numbers matters. I think hardcore numbers in America, but I find that other countries degree heavy. Who, you know, matters. And I don't know if that's kind of reading between the lines of maybe more welcoming. I think probably what I said sounds negative, but maybe you can shed a positive light on it.
• 4:50
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, actually I would agree with you. I think growing up in India at least I went through sort of a British educational system. And I would say grades really mattered, education really mattered, degree really mattered. I think the last time I was on the show, I actually spoke to you about this internal competition that I've had with my siblings over the years about who has the most degrees. And that was something that was embedded in our upbringing with My dad and he always instilled a value of education. So I totally agree with you on that. And yeah, I would also say that
• 5:21
  Speaker B: this, the discipline, the disciplinary system over there might not be as controlled as America as well. There might be some harsher discipline. I'm just imagining, I don't know, like if you didn't, if you came home with a bad grade or something, I just can imagine.
• 5:33
  Speaker A: I think what's important is growing up, I would say that one of the things that was embedded in me was sort of my worth and my value came from the grades that I got. And as we get into the podcast today, I think this one concept that I want to sort of talk about is this notion of the examine leader. And it's about how you create sort of self awareness. And a lot of that self awareness that I've created for myself has been based on sort of going through therapy for the last 10 years. And there's been reasons why I've gone through that. And one of the big sort of revelations that I had therapy was this notion of I need to separate my worth from, from my work, from my grades. And I think I've been caught up in situations at work where if there's a project that's failed, for instance, I've sort of taken it as a personal failure. And then I've often sort of told myself, oh, I don't want this project to fail. So we'll keep going with this project, we'll keep trying to implement the system, for instance, and you have to step back and think about why you do that. Because in a lot of cases, what you're unable to separate is this notion that you need to sort of separate your worth from your work. And I've had to sort of tell myself that this is not a reflection of my work and this is not a reflection of my worth. And what I need to do is sort of make the right call for the organization. And sometimes the right call for the organization might be stopping that project, killing that system or whatever it is. Right. And I think that when you're not able to separate the two, you sort of get into making decisions that unfortunately might not be the right decisions for the organization.
• 7:10
  Speaker B: I love it. It's selfless. And I think from a selfish or personal perspective, I think your self worth is going to come from me. Right. So we could spend a lot of time, and I'm just saying this because a lot of us and just being an American, like, yeah, our self worth is our career and all these different things and meanwhile our family suffers. So with that being said, what you just said, from a team perspective and from a company vision perspective, or from I guess a culture, I think would be more of a culture perspective, is that team wins. It's not just about self and how you grow. And I think what you said is so important because I achievers, overachievers don't want to give up. They really don't want to have a project that fails. But with that being said, how do we close the failure gap in an industry where most projects go 20% over budget? So many Black Swan ERP projects, so many things not delivering on time. Shadow IT, shadow AI, I guess. How do we stop or how do we figure out where it breaks down and how do we close the failure gap? Because I would love everyone to listen to this and all of the failures to end. Most IT leaders don't have an Internet problem. They have a management problem. Multiple locations, multiple providers, multiple bills, different contracts. We help IT leaders make Internet boring again by consolidating visibility and billing support and monitoring without changing providers or forcing upgrades. If nothing needs fixing, we'll tell you that's vendor neutral advisory. Just go to you've been heard.com and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline and save.
• 8:52
  Speaker A: Yeah, and I think. Let me sort of set the context, Phil. I just read a statistic not too long ago that said about 75% of transformation projects actually do not end up delivering the outcomes that they intended. So let's sit with that just for a second. Right. This is not sort of underperform a little. This isn't 5%, 15%, even 50%. This is 75%. So 75% of them do not deliver the change that they promised within the organization. Right. So clearly there is this sort of gap between what your intention is and then what you've actually delivered in terms of outcomes for the organization. Right. And I sort of look at that gap. I've sort of been doing this now for a little over 26 years and I've been leading a lot of transformations. And I think for me it sort of comes down to three big things. The first thing that it comes down to is sort of looking inward. I think as leaders we have a set of fallacies that we need to work on, and I'll get into some of those in just a second. I think that a good strategy or a good decision doesn't always sort of land the outcomes that it's supposed to land. And as leaders, we need to think about how we can contribute to closing that gap, closing that divide, let's say. I think the second sort of pillar of how to close that gap is really around the culture of an organization. And I think that for me is you have to think about the culture of an organization and whether it's actually going to be ready to absorb the transformation and the change that you're looking to roll out. And is the culture of the organization going to embrace it? Is it going to tolerate it? Is it going to throw that change out? And how are people going to react when that sort of change lands on them? Right. So that's the second piece of it, and the third piece of it is really around sort of the operations. Right. So how would you spend your time? How do you spend your money? How is data used? And if you think about things in those three buckets and we can get into more detail around those, I think that's how you really start closing that 75% gap that sort of currently exists today.
• 11:04
  Speaker B: First of all, looking inward to ourselves to see where our own blockers are, we've got cultural challenges. I guess the culture piece too, though, is like, even if once we look inward and we find out our own problems ourselves, and you're saying, okay, what are the problems of the culture now and what would be preventing that? I guess my question to you is just challenge you, just based on what you said earlier is you've looked inward to see what your issues are. But whatever that change is, why essentially should the change, or even the spark or the spark of change even. Where is that coming from to begin with? Is it coming from you? Right. So like, how are we even coming about to that we even want to do any type of change or transformation to begin with? And. And should the idea really be coming from you, or are you gathering this from all different types of things?
• 11:48
  Speaker A: Yeah. So when we think about change sort of in general terms, everything around us is changing. I mean, think about the impact that AI is having on each one of our companies, and that's driving us to change how we think about our organizations, how we think about generating incremental revenue, how we think about generating cost savings and productivity improvements. Right? So change is the only constant. There's always change that's hitting us. I would argue that over the last couple of years, the speed or the rate of change has gone up exponentially with everything that's happening related to AI. And as leaders, if we're not ready to sort of embrace that change and to become change agents for our organizations, we're not going to have that leadership seat anymore. I mean, there's already companies out there, like there's Walmart, there's Adobe, I can get into a couple other companies that have pushed out leaders within their organizations because those leaders were operating from a previous playbook that wasn't ready for how change needs to be thought about and how transformation needs to be thought about in this AI era that we've just kicked off over the last couple of years.
• 12:57
  Speaker B: So true. Okay, let's just start on your first three to five bullet points on how to look inward for people that like. Because we only see what we see, we only know what we know, we don't know what we don't know. It's basically kind of a really shallow way of looking at it. But how can we self diagnose or do we need someone else to do that?
• 13:18
  Speaker A: Yeah. So let's start sort of looking inward. Right. And I'll give you the first sort of tool that I want to sort of think about is this notion of what's called pattern recognition. And it's not sort of the statistical or mathematical definition of pattern recognition. So at times your brain can almost be manipulated consciously or subconsciously to focus on a pattern that you have seen before. Right. And as leaders, often what we do is we walk into organizations and we try to apply a previous pattern to that new organization without sort of recognizing that the new organization that we're in has a completely different context. We think that an old pattern can work in a new environment, let's say. Right. So what works for Lockheed Martin is not going to be what works for SpaceX, for instance. Right. Two very different contexts. So our brain has this tendency to sort of go on autopilot and take previous patterns and start to apply them even though the context is very different. And this is one of the tools that I think about quite often, which is, is the previous pattern, is the previous playbook really applicable in the context that I'm in? And if it's not, don't apply it. I mean, this is what I call the anti pattern. So sometimes you have to sort of leave the old pattern in place and almost think about what the pattern for the new organizations needs to be, which is the anti pattern. That's one thing that I think about that leaders sort of constantly have to do and constantly have to sort of think about as they're operating in new organizations. So that's one of the tools that I think about.
• 14:59
  Speaker B: There's a lot of challenges and problems that come up with that one. They Might only have one pattern. Two, they might not be bold enough or believe enough in themselves or be creative enough to even be able to realize and see something doesn't feel right here. I think that that's what it really is. I think that sometimes people get fooled and that's how we end up buying things, that. That's how we end up buying shiny objects. Yeah. Because someone comes in and they're like, this is it. This is the solution, and this is how we end up with a tool first.
• 15:31
  Speaker A: And I think what's important in sort of situations like that is to really surround yourself with people that really will tell you that this is a pattern that needs to be applied with caution in this instance and why it needs to be applied with caution. Right. And I think what good leaders do is they surround themselves with people that are going to give them that feedback, that are going to give them that coaching and say, this might actually not work here, or, yes, it might work here, but this is what you have to think about. And I think that sort of notion of feedback and that notion of sort of robust debate that comes with surrounding yourself with people that are not gonna just say yes to you, I think is really important. Because I've seen a lot of transformations fail because leaders did not wanna listen to feedback from other individuals around them.
• 16:21
  Speaker B: One of the most effective things, one of the best pieces of advice I actually got was along that line. Kind of the opposite, but I think it's the same. And that is basically trust your instincts. Like, just because AI says something, or just because so and so said it, or because the director of sales at Salesforce said it, or because this program or this guru said that, you kind of have, like, a good feeling when you're in your environment. You understand your cultural role and you understand your people well. You kind of have this little feeling that's like, something's not right here, it doesn't fit, that needs to be changed. Like, don't use that. Even though the prompt popped this out, like, maybe 80% of it's good, but the other 20%, I think a lot of times people might doubt their own instincts. I don't know if that's in. In line with what you're saying, but sometimes I really needed someone to tell me, that doesn't work here. And you're right, actually, like, that won't work in this situation. It works in 99% of the situations. But your instinct that it's not gonna work here is correct.
• 17:24
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I think part of it is, like, you Need a mechanism to test some of your decisions with groups of people or with individuals. Right. And this is example from not too long ago. I think it's been about a year or so. I drove up to a Taco Bell. It was about 10 minutes before I needed to pick up my kids. And I was hangry, let's say. And there was little sign outside the drive through that said, AI is lending a hand. And there was a part of me that was super excited about it, given the work that I do. And there was a part of me that was, like, scared about what was about to happen. It was a rainy day. It was a windy day, and I sort of gave it my order, and I just wanted a Crunchwrap Supreme. And that's what I told it. And it didn't really understand what I was saying because of the rain, because of the wind. And next thing I know, it finalized their $25 order for me with four different items in the bag. I was late to pick up my kids, but I was sort of asking myself the question. I'm like, that's like, how was this tested? Like, a decision was made to roll out AI, but was it really tested around conditions like wind and rail? And there's actually a lot of sort of media around this. They actually accepted that. And I think the comment that their chief technology officer made was, sometimes AI works and sometimes it doesn't. Well, I don't think you want to roll it out when it doesn't.
• 18:53
  Speaker B: 70% of the time, AI works in a tested, like, in a very intestine environment. I actually had a really good AI experience the other day. Really, really good. And I've reached out to the cto and I think I need to keep saying this over and over again until he decides to come on the show. And they did really, really good on booking my appointment, following up, listening to me, making sure I was heard, and not a single human touched it. I went to their website. I like. I, like, really vibed into this, like, little chat bar. Like, I just hit, like, transcription, right? I was like, look, my air handler's not working. I already turned it on and off. I already went to the breaker panel. I shut off all the breakers. I pulled out all the main, like, plugs at each unit. Outside, I checked for dead mice. I, like, went through the whole thing. Like, I took the front panel off. There's no lights to the panel. There's no power going to this. I was like, just this whole long paragraph, send. I get back, like, phil, it sounds like you've been pretty thorough with what you've checked already. Let me make sure I understand you correctly. You've done this, this, this, this, and this and all of this. So definitely a technician needs to come out. Does Tuesday at 10 o' clock work? Or would Wednesday at 3pm work better? And I was like, Tuesday at 10 o'. Clock. And I was like, okay, we've sent you a meeting reminder. You'll get a text message reminder as well, and we'll make sure someone from the office on Monday follows up right away. This was Sunday night. I was like, blown away.
• 20:22
  Speaker A: That's awesome.
• 20:23
  Speaker B: And Service Titan, whoever you are, Service Titan, I need you. And I called them up and I was like, what do you guys use? They're like, service titan. I was like, we're on like a beta. And I was like, of course you're on a beta, because it's an AI thing. Like, of course you're on beta. Whoever you are. Service Titan, cto, cio, director of development or something, please, come on. You've been heard. We're giving you a shout out right now. It's free. You don't even have to pay for this. And we're telling you that you're awesome and you're actually using AI correctly. In a world where 95% of all AI projects fail, according to the MIT study that was released over a year ago, and hopefully we're better right now. They all become black swan projects. They all fail and people spend a ton of money and this should be an advertisement that someone pays me for. So. And I immediately called my other H Vac friend. H Vac. You got to say it like that down in Philly. And I was like, dude, you got to use this because how many other guys are up in the ceiling? They answer a phone call, then they're like, yeah, I'll be there tomorrow. Then they forget because they just can't do all this. They need Service Titan. Yeah, Service titan. Okay, why do they fail? So we've looked inward. Do we have just some five bullet points? Like some questions we could ask ourselves. But what bullet points should we have or should we be asking ourselves when we want to look inward?
• 21:38
  Speaker A: Yeah. So I would say the first bullet point is really around this notion of pattern and anti patterns. So really asking yourself whether a previous pattern applies in the context that you're in and why it might apply or why it might not apply. Right. So I think that's one of the things I think the second patterns of
• 21:56
  Speaker B: just issues, like every time this happens, I gain 20 pounds and start eating again. How about bad patterns like that? Or every time this happens, I seem to go start looking for a vendor first instead of talking to my end users first. Are there patterns like that?
• 22:10
  Speaker A: There's patterns like that. And I think that to your point, there's good patterns that you want to reapply and I think you have to ask yourself whether you can reapply that pattern or not. And then there's bad patterns that hopefully we've learned never to apply because they just lead to bad outcomes. But I think your point is, a good point is we have to learn that there's good patterns and bad patterns, and good patterns don't always get applied. Bad patterns should probably never get applied because they normally do not work in most situations.
• 22:42
  Speaker B: What do I habitually do? Also, I think a lot of people will overanalyze or paralysis by over analysis. I think there's some people that might get into that.
• 22:52
  Speaker A: Let me give you a couple more bullet points, right, Please. When you're making a decision, I think you have to sort of not only ask yourself, did we make a smart decision? And as leaders, we are trained to make good decisions. There's a million books out there that teach you how to make good decisions. There's all these decision making frameworks, there's Racey, there's dai, I can name a few of them. Right. But the question you have to really ask yourself is, are we ready for what will come from this decision? Right. And I think that gets you to think about the unintended consequences of that decision and how that decision is going to land on people, on your customers, on your consumers, on the culture of the organization, on systems. How is it going to impact processes? Right. So thinking about the ripple effect of a decision is one of the other tools that I sort of get leaders to sort of think about in this sort of inward context, let's say. And then the other thing I would say is that this notion of sort of self awareness, which I have gained through a lot of work I've done on myself, including therapy, I think that really gets you to sort of think about your upbringing. It gets you to think about your cultural context, it gets you to think about your fears and your ambitions and what causes you anxiety and doesn't cause you anxiety, for instance, right? Because guess what? When we show up in a meeting, when we show up at work, we are bringing all of that with us. We are bringing our upbringing with us, we're bringing our cultural context with us, we are bringing our fears Our ambitions, our anxiety with us. Right. So that shows up in the room that is in the room, whether you like it or not. And having that level of self awareness is really important.
• 24:36
  Speaker B: Any suggestions or books or methods or anything like that?
• 24:40
  Speaker A: Find a great therapist. I've tried to find a good book on it and I think a lot of books that are out there go over interesting frameworks, they give you interesting tools. But I think the process of engaging with a therapist, that therapist is going to ask you a series of questions that are going to get you to think and that way dialogue is really, really important. A book is not going to give you a two way dialogue. And I would say that's where sort of actually having that human interaction is going to be really, really important. This is one of those things I wouldn't use ChatGPT for or any I know. I think a lot of people use ChatGPT for therapy and kinds of questions a good therapist will ask you. ChatGPT is not going to be able to ask you those questions.
• 25:25
  Speaker B: I think a good resource is Psychology Today. I think the articles there are like, first of all, I think you could find a good therapist there too. I think there's like probably some kind of like finding tool or something like that, but the articles and stuff really bring up kind of like some in depth like topics and understanding of how humans operate. I think I went to a therapist when I was like under a lot of stress as a business manager and had like an insane staff and really, really strict budget and a very, very high achieving senior executive manager. And even though I was like one of the best, right? And I was performing like highly performing and I found out later on that this person told me I was like one of the best, I thought I was the worst. Like when you're the best and you come into work every day and you feel like you could do one thing and get fired, that's a problem. Yeah. And it's just like that level of stress is like I don't ever want to experience ever again in my life.
• 26:19
  Speaker A: That's a good segue into culture. Right. And I think that's part of what going through a process of self awareness and therapy sometimes is about. Right. It's. We all have a work history attached to us. Unless you've just, you know, graduated from college or high school or whatever it is. I think we all have a work history attached to us and we also have a notion of work sometimes that we've seen from people around us, whether it's our parents, whether it's our uncles and aunts or whatever it is. And I think again, that is part of our upbringing. And those are things that we really have to dissect as we go through this process of becoming much more self aware.
• 26:52
  Speaker B: You were saying, can culture, can culture tolerate change? So what we're supposed to be talking about is closing the failure gap.
• 26:59
  Speaker A: So.
• 27:00
  Speaker B: And we might have to have some kind of concrete example here to kind of try and make some of this come clear. In other words, I don't know whether it be an ERP change or some typical thing that everyone goes through. It's like, okay, first of all, we already looked inwardly. We know that maybe my recipe for success at every company is not going to apply here to this one. And we can't just use SAP everywhere in the world or whatever it is. I don't know, can my culture tolerate it?
• 27:23
  Speaker A: Yeah. So one thing that I think about related to culture often, and I think this is where sort of culture either expands the failure gap or actually shrinks it is this notion of we've all worked at companies that have values and they post it on the walls and on the hallways and all of that good stuff. Right. And then I see behaviors within that organization that actually are very counter to those values. Right. I've seen like a value around respect, for instance, and then the company tolerates individuals that are not respectful to each other. And I think when you start to see this misalignment between a value and the actual behaviors that occur within that organization, that to me is a telltale sign of the fact that this culture is not ready for change. Because on one hand you're preaching something and on the other hand you're practicing something very different. The other thing that I sort of think about, I think coming back to sort of recipe and let's stay on this topic of values is I find values to be important, but at times they're very lofty, for instance. Right. And they're not specific enough to actually guide some of your decisions and guide some of your behaviors. And let me give you an example of something. I think if you have a value that says that the customer is always king or queen or the customer comes first, let's say. Right. Let's say that's your value. You might end up making decisions that are counter to your business strategy that might put the customer first. Right. But this is where this notion of operating principles comes in, where you say, yes, our value is that the customer is first. However, we always in a situation where and a staff member or a team member or an employee has to go and do something that is unethical to satisfy the customer, we will not do it. Right. And I think that gives you clear guidelines around how to apply those values and specific best practices or principles around how far those values should go and how far those values should not go. And I think this is where I've seen organizations either succeed or not succeed, which is they really distill those values down into operating principles. And I think those operating principles really gets you to sort of make sure that you're aligned with how you think about that value and how you sort of actually show up in terms of how that value sort of shows up within the organization. So that's one piece of it around sort of values and operating principles. I think the other piece that I sort of think about is in a lot of organizations, and I think this is a great example, maybe one we can talk about related to sort of erp, but I think it applies more widely speaking is this notion of sort of activity versus outcomes. Right. I think historically we have been very fixated on measuring activity. Right. How many meetings, how many initiatives? I think even with AI transformations, for instance, I think a lot of leaders go to their boards and their senior management, and instead of talking about the value that those AI initiatives are generating in terms of dollars or productivity improvements or whatever it is, they talk about the number of pilots they're running, for instance. Right. And I think there has to be this shift between sort of thinking about how busy we are as teams versus thinking about what outcomes and value that team is actually generating and what impact it's having on the business. And I think that is a cultural shift that not many organizations sort of often make. And then I think one of the other things. And there's many more that we can get into, but one of the.
• 31:11
  Speaker B: Let me just make sure I understand that correctly, though, because I think a lot of the summary of that is when it comes to values or when it comes to activity, for example, is that we're being specific and then we're aligning whatever specific activity to an actual outcome.
• 31:27
  Speaker A: That's right.
• 31:28
  Speaker B: And I mean, for the 30 projects that might get thrown at any IT leader, how many of those 30 actually deliver to the bottom vine or are helping alleviate the number one challenge that's holding the business back from scaling?
• 31:42
  Speaker A: Exactly.
• 31:43
  Speaker B: Questions we can ask to make sure should we be measuring the activity versus the outcome here or questions we should be asking around measurement?
• 31:55
  Speaker A: Yeah, the questions we should be asking is what changed for the Customer, what improved for employees? What measurable outcomes are we actually going to see? Those are the questions you should be asking, not how many pilots you're actually running within the organization.
• 32:11
  Speaker B: Where's the disconnect for a lot of these people? What's the number one thing they should be measuring an activity up to? Or, like, is there just, like, some basics that we can just, like, make it third grade for that, everybody? To me, it is because I stayed back in first grade. So to me, like, business has to be that simple or I wouldn't be successful.
• 32:29
  Speaker A: I think the simple question is, like, this activity is in service of what business goal or what business outcome? And if you're not able to draw that connection between an activity and a business outcome, you might want to tell yourself to stop that activity because it's not resulting in a. Well, either stop the activity or ask someone the question that says, I'm struggling to connect this between, like, connect the
• 32:53
  Speaker B: dots, drill down, be specific. Drill down and be specific. Okay, super awesome. Where do we want to go next? Because, honestly, we could talk about all the stuff that we need to talk about probably over a series of 10 shows. Psychology alone is like the psychology of, should we go see a therapist? And what's the actual state of it? Leaders in general is like a whole podcast.
• 33:12
  Speaker A: It is. And maybe I'll wrap up the culture section by saying, I think another sort of sign for me of a healthy culture is feedback loops as to whether they exist or not exist within an organization. Right. So do frontline employees feel safe telling you when something isn't working? Do customers have a way to signal friction that actually gets heard? Do you review unintended consequences regularly when you're sort of rolling out a new initiative? Let's go back to our Taco Bell example. Like, did someone think about what the unintended consequences were? And in a lot of cases, I bet I've seen this in a lot of organizations. I think there are actually people that know what the unintended consequences are going to be. And sometimes they don't have a voice or they're not talking about what the unintended consequences are likely going to be or how to figure those out. And I think that's not a sign of a good culture. Because you want to hear about these problems actually, before Taco Bell thing is
• 34:11
  Speaker B: laughable, to be honest with you. What that tells me is that there was someone that was like, AI is going to make us rich. Yeah, we're going to be able to cut back one hourly employee per Whatever. Per thing. I'm okay with the self checkout at Walmart, I really am because it works. But for some reason when I go to stop and shop, it's everything I ring up is like, beep. The light goes on, someone's got to come over and like check the thing. So I get so frustrated and like I go to the one person that's a live line, like a live person and they're like, we can go over the self checkout. I can show you. And I was like, no thanks.
• 34:47
  Speaker A: Yeah, so I think let's maybe shift gears a little bit towards the operational side of it. And I think sort of good operations actually helps you close that failure gap as well. And when I think about operations, I sort of think about three different areas. I think one is sort of how time and money are spent. And this gets into this conversation about prioritization, Right. And I think you really have to ask yourself, are we investing time and decisions with the biggest blast radius that are actually going to have the most impact for the organization? Our customers, our consumers, our employees? Right. Are we allocating our resources where it matters the most? And I think most importantly, a strategy professor of mine once told me said a good strategy is knowing what to say yes to, but equally importantly knowing what to say no to. Right. And I have seen a lot of strategy work done, a lot of strategy decks put together, and very few of them actually have a clear statement around this is what we are going to say no to. And I think that for me, prioritization struggles often at companies because you don't know what to say no to, what to say yes to in a lot of cases. But when you don't know what to say no to, people work on the wrong things. So I think that's about just one
• 36:07
  Speaker B: point to that, one point to that. Every great coach that I've had and I've spent a lot of money on this stuff, every single one has said, it's about what we're taking off your plate.
• 36:16
  Speaker A: Exactly.
• 36:17
  Speaker B: It's about what you're not doing. Then my right hand man, Greg Liddell, the Frenchman, he knows. No, Phil, we're not doing the info tech Better than InfoTech IT Leadership Scorecard app that we're going to build and give away for free. Like, no, we're not doing that right now.
• 36:39
  Speaker A: That's so awesome.
• 36:40
  Speaker B: I know, look at what I coded and look at all the research that I did and. But Infotech shouldn't be charging for that. It's ridiculous. We can give it away for Free.
• 36:49
  Speaker A: No, Phil, awesomeness doesn't equate to business value. Right. Some of the things that are not awesome are actually quite simple to do. Actually generate more business.
• 36:59
  Speaker B: I could not agree more. The most boringest things in the world make great money. And you have to show up every day and grudgingly do this thing and you will make money. I try to tell my kids that all the time. Whatever that book is, it's like, do what you love and you'll never work another day in your life is a load of crap.
• 37:20
  Speaker A: It is. And by the way, that follow your passion I think applies when you've made enough money in life, then I would say go follow your passion. Otherwise in a lot of cases, there's some hard decisions sometimes you have to make with sort of sustaining yourself and your family versus what your passion allows you to do. Agreed.
• 37:39
  Speaker B: 100%. Yeah. What are we ending with? You get the final.
• 37:42
  Speaker A: I'm going to end with two final thoughts. I think the two final thoughts I'm going to end with is when I think about operations, I think about data. We haven't talked about data at all today, but I think data is sort of very interesting. I have some principles around how I think about data. I think one of my sort of interesting principles around data is what you measure, you become. And often the measurement follows the incentives, right? So I think that in a lot of companies I work for, if you measure the number of tickets that your IT team or your service desk is actually solving for, then that's what you become. You become a very activity driven organization versus measuring the outcomes that those tickets are actually generating, for instance, right? And then if you have a measurement around, and I've often seen this with like sales reps, for instance, like in previous lives, let's say sales reps were measured by the number of calls they made or the number of stops they made at sort of doctor's offices, let's say, right? Activity, activity, activity, activity, activity, activity. But more importantly, they told themselves that they're incentivized to drive activity, but they're not incentivized to drive revenue. And your measurement dictates often what the incentives are for you. And that can create a misalignment for you as an organization. And that again creates a wider gap.
• 39:08
  Speaker B: Yes, we're measuring answers to questions. We're definitely measuring podcasts done with the right people. And when I say measuring the questions, one of the questions that we ask a lot is when it comes to your CSP, VAR, MSP, the CDWs of the world. What's your single biggest frustration, problem or concern? And surprise, surprise, what we find is that we feel like people are pushing boxes. They're just trying to push a product they get paid an extra few points on. We don't like the people that are the Swiss army knife vendor to everything because they don't do anything well, but they do everything kind of mediocre. We'd rather have people tell us what they really, really do well. And if we measure that, we really, really find out what matters most. Yeah, we also find out who the real IT leaders are. We actually find out the people are that actually have a seat at the executive roundtable and are heard. And so we measure a lot of things. But it's amazing you can measure, believe it or not, human language and there's models and patterns to it.
• 40:12
  Speaker A: The other thing that I find really interesting is sometimes a lack of data is data itself. Like think about employee surveys just for a second, right? If 70% of the employees respond to a survey and 30% of people don't, there's data in why 30% did not respond to that survey. So lack of data is also data. And a lot of people analyze the data that they got, but they don't analyze the data that they did not get.
• 40:39
  Speaker B: You just maybe have a leap in faith in the data mind blowing thing because we talk about it every day like data is everything. It's the gold, it's the new whatever. We talk about that. But I think you just helped me hit like even just a new level of mind blowing thought when it comes to data. Now as far as AI though, and all of the things that we've kind of been poo pooing a little bit, I do think there is an option here that you should build along with your philosophy of. I think there's a potential IT AI psychologist agent that could actually help you look inward, ask questions, break patterns, ask you if your culture is ready to tolerate the change that is coming up and then make sure that you say no to whatever that is because it's just going to screw up the budget anyways. Yeah, first thing it's going to do is as you quit, it should just say no first. First of all, no. It should say no to you throw this project away 50 times. And then if you keep coming back like okay, what pattern do you want to throw at this? And can your culture even handle it? Maybe might even want to go backwards. We might want to say no first, then hit the culture and then is the culture ready for you? And are you going to screw it all up and break the culture anyways because you come in with some crazy pattern that's just not going to work?
• 42:01
  Speaker A: Yeah. And you know what, you hit on a really interesting point which is around sort of operations. One of the other things I think about is like how resources are allocated and I specifically think about human resources here. Often I have seen like when you start a transformation, you like, you hire like tons and tons of people within the organization to actually drive that transformation forward, but you haven't really defined what their roles and responsibilities are and what they're going to do. And then those people end up creating busy work for themselves and for the rest of the organization. And that actually deviates from the mission of the transformation because instead of actually focusing on what the organization needs, you're creating busy work just to validate your existence within that organization.
• 42:49
  Speaker B: Yes, yes, yes. It's so true. Setting clear expectations, making sure that we communicate. The job's not easy. You make it look. I guess I, I would like to say easy, but I guess it's probably a career full of failing forward and a lot of mistakes and hard earned battles won. So Rajvir, it's been a pleasure having you, having you on. You've been heard and you've been heard.
• 43:13
  Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you, Phil, for having me today.