Latest / Harder Than Life / 159: The Secret Playbook Behind Microsoft’s Most Radical Tech

Transcript

159: The Secret Playbook Behind Microsoft’s Most Radical Tech · Harder Than Life

• 0:07
  I'm Kelly Siegel, and this is Harder Than Life, a podcast about self-love, self-awareness, business, and health. We tell outrageous stories and boil everything down to simple, practical advice you can start using today. Let's get living.
• 0:23
  What's up, Heart and Life Nation? It's your boy, Kelly Siegel, and today's guest is going to blow your mind. She's just not talking innovation, she's built it. Joanne Garvin, former director of innovation at Microsoft, where she literally shaped billion dollar tech, including something called the Regenerative Data Center of the Future. Yeah, that's a real thing. She's now the founder of Regenerous Labs, and she's dropping game-changing wisdom in her new book, The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft.
• 0:53
  And get this, all proceeds go to STEAM education nonprofits. So not only is she building the future, she's building the people who will lead it. So let's dig in. Welcome, Joanne. Hi. Thank you for that intro. All right. Let's go there from the jump. What's one myth about innovation that drives you absolutely nuts? And why do most companies keep getting it wrong?
• 1:18
  The biggest myth is one we hear everybody lament, which is it's a select few people that are endowed with the innovation gifts.
• 1:30
  And it's so not true. And I flippantly say if somebody says they're a lone genius, they're just taking credit for everybody else's work. Because it really does take everyone to go from a blank sheet of paper to something real to scale it out into the world.
• 1:52
  And innovation is defined by creating value for other people. It's not the invention itself or your accolades. It's have you changed somebody's life for the better, hopefully. That takes an entire ecosystem of people. It persists. People think some people are just gifted innovators.
• 2:14
  One question in, and you already had me thinking about how I am as a leader. I have always been push, push, push, push until something happens. And very recently, I have said, you know what? I got to realize that I have some really brilliant people that work with me and let them do their magic. And it is one of the hardest things.
• 2:36
  transitions to make from going to being the person that everybody goes to the saying, Hey, what do you guys think? I implemented this and you probably have heard this for the one, three, one rule where I, what's the one issue. Give me the clear issue. Not four of them. What's the one issue. Give me three solutions and the one that you would choose and,
• 2:56
  It fosters collaboration and then they really buy into what the solution is and we collaborate with it together. Usually the solution that they come up with is the one that everybody would have come up with. So just a little thing that I learned for the better as we're scaling crazily. Yeah, I don't have that framework in my toolbox, but I do now. So thank you.
• 3:19
  That's what's fun about these interviews because we get to learn from each other. And that's the, it's such an unwritten, I just have fun with this stuff. You said before we hit record, you wouldn't think that we are integrated, but we are. And everything is about innovation and we're going to need it more now than ever before. So you were a part of the lead innovation at Microsoft.
• 3:40
  It's like being the Navy seal of tech strategy. Tell me, what was your holy smokes moment when you knew a project or breakthrough was going to change everything? So my particular domain was the data centers. These are the big warehouses of computers that power everything we do now. And.
• 3:59
  And they really haven't changed much in decades. They actually, one 20-year veteran of the industry said to me, he's like, remember back in the 90s when we had like servers and closets in the office and that's where our email lived? He goes, all we really did was make the closet bigger.
• 4:22
  And I'm like, well, that doesn't sound like a very creative solution. So we, this group of people, set out on a mission to say, let's take everything we've learned, but let's start from blank sheet of paper. And knowing what we know now, let's reimagine what a data center can be.
• 4:43
  So it took about a year of exploration, design, development to get to the first real possible version of this thing. And when the team delivered the pictures and the proposal back to me, which I had been part of, but it's their expertise that brought it all together, I had to take a walk.
• 5:10
  They showed it to me. They explained all the benefits of it and the integration with nature and community and business and and just all the problems that it solved. And after everything was said and done, I just had to, like, go out, take a walk.
• 5:28
  and let it percolate because it was just so moving to see what was possible. You've got my attention. I am a almost 30 year geek in this business. I've owned my IT cybersecurity company for 27 years and I have been through thousands of data centers from way back in the day till now. Your person was right, it's just a bigger closet. I've seen some cool innovations, but tell me,
• 5:56
  what you guys collaborated and came up with that make them the data centers of the future. What does that mean for an end user? So there's a lot I can't go into because it's Microsoft's. But there is quite a bit of it that's out in the public now as far as pictures and presentations. The big thing was how we went about solving it. So the clearest way to think about it, as somebody in tech, we have iterated and innovated the chip
• 6:25
  out for decades, right? Like the computers we run now are very different than the computers we ran in the eighties, nineties, and even last year, right? There's just more power and they don't have fans that spin up and like, you can't hear yourself think over them. Like think of all the little things that changed around computers. Well, that's what's living in these data centers.
• 6:53
  So much attention has been paid to innovating from the chip out that by the time these engineers and designers got to the walls of the data center, they kind of exhausted their budgets, their bandwidth, their timelines, the patience from executives. So from the walls out, nothing has changed.
• 7:19
  Right. It's still just a big pavement lot with a warehouse built as cheaply as possible. Fill it with as much compute as you can power and figure out how to cool it. So what we did was we said, well, like any good product, who are we serving? Are we serving the chip? Is that our customer? And it's like, no, the chip isn't our customer. The chip's a tool to get the job done.
• 7:48
  So we went outside and started innovating in.
• 7:53
  And when you do that, you can't help but run into nature and government and the community that houses the data center and the neighbors that have to look at the data center and hear it and all of the impacts that building a data center and operating it has on all of those customers in addition to the people we're serving in the cloud.
• 8:20
  So by expanding our customer list to include all the people and other entities that we impact, we uncovered all kinds of opportunities to rethink from dirt to data. Better, cheaper, faster. So I date myself so bad. I've sold companies their first ever internet connection. That's how long I've been doing this. And people would say, how? What are we going to need this internet thing for?
• 8:49
  You're going to need this more than you need air and electricity. And we are there now. So I remember selling, I sold a Sun Microsystems server, and it was either one terabyte or 10 terabytes of storage, which is not a lot anymore. But this was 30 years ago. It was a million dollars.
• 9:08
  A million dollars. And you can think we could buy a 10 terabyte little, little sand storage for $50 now. The innovation is getting so much faster. And I tell people you literally need to get a new computer at least every three years, probably every two years, because it's, it's doubling in capacity and speed. Well, the funny thing is cheaper, faster, better still applies when we go from the outside in and it actually works.
• 9:36
  So much of the innovation space has been guided by efficiency, optimization. And how we describe that is it's a focus on doing less bad or reducing costs. It's all minimization. When you flip it to how can we do more, how can we create value, how can we create a surplus around us, as Satya Nadella says,
• 10:03
  You can't solve the problem the same way when you flip from aiming for negative or neutral to aiming for positive. When you aim for positive, all of a sudden a bunch of out-of-the-box solutions are no longer relevant. It forces you to innovate and get uncomfortable.
• 10:24
  So how did you guys get to the mindset of innovation? You keep going outside in, and I immediately understood what you were saying. And it's not normally what you would identify Microsoft with, but lately I see it because I work with them every day. So how do you get into the mindset of innovation from the small to medium-sized businesses that they just dominate? It starts with, we've had a very tech-centric experience.
• 10:53
  universe for the last couple of decades, right? Yeah. We buy the technology and then we figure out how to use it. And we, we introduce a framework in the book. That's an old framework from the Xbox team called BXT. And it's a triangle and the B is for business. So your business model, how are you going to make money? The T is for the technology, how are you going to enable the
• 11:22
  is for experience, which could have been an E, but it's Team Xbox. So X for experience is that what's the experience you're creating for your customer and for your partners and your supply chain and your employees?
• 11:39
  And the lesson there, it really is a design mindset. Like designers are taught this in school. Start with the customer and then figure out how to serve a business and technology to them. So what we say to technologists and engineers and everybody else that's kind of starting in business or in tech, it's like, no, lead with X. If you lead with X...
• 12:07
  And figure out the B and the T to support them, you're going to innovate and you're going to out-compete your partners. And that applies to Microsoft. That applies to the bread baker on Main Street. If you lead with your customer's experience, you're going to deliver value to them.
• 12:26
  I am so grateful you just said that. You may have answered this question, but I'm gonna bring up what we talked about off camera as well is that's literally how we're changing our entire IT cybersecurity. What do we want in the world? What we wanted to get the fast and we want accurate information. So we have literally put it all online. You can order, buy, pay and install, including the Microsoft entire package of cybersecurity. We built it around Microsoft.
• 12:56
  answer questions without having a sales rep done. It's just literally the fastest and simplest thing. And if you have questions, there is a chat bot that'll pop up that's been meticulously programmed. We took the, all the middle out of it and made it simple because nobody knows what, what do I need for cybersecurity? What do I need for this? What we made it, we hit one.
• 13:17
  We have three packages, made it so simple, and we believe it's gonna change the way that the IT is consumed, purchased, and really viewed. We've kind of commoditized it, and I didn't mean to do that, but...
• 13:33
  I just, I started with the consumer. What drives me nuts? I want to go, I have questions about a product. I can't get answers. I got, I get spun by a salesperson. I just said, I don't want to do this. That's why we excel at National Technology Management. But I'm going to ask this question again, because I,
• 13:49
  I think you answered it. But again, I run a fast scaling IT and cybersecurity company and I run a coaching community for high performers. And the book highlights that Xbox and Visual Studio Code, two radically different products. So what lessons from Microsoft's playbook can entrepreneurs or even a coach apply to tomorrow?
• 14:11
  That's a great question. I think at an abstract level, pretty much everything in the book. But if we want to take some just like really easy to transfer lessons, the Visual Studio Code has this great mindset of zero distance to the user. So this is a developer platform, right? It's for all the people building web-based software. Right.
• 14:35
  And this small group of people, the team is about 50 people. They actually create tools that 70% of the professional developer world uses. So hundreds of millions of developers are supported by this little team of 50 people. Yeah.
• 14:54
  What they figured out was if they isolated themselves from the environment that they were trying to support in any way, what you just described with cybersecurity, if there was a bunch of middle layers in between them and the developer world, they were going to get things wrong. And people were going to get annoyed and then they wouldn't use the platform. And that's the whole point. They're in business.
• 15:21
  So they instituted a mindset of zero distance to the user. They use their tools. They talk to their users. They listen to their users. They put their roadmap out into the community for everybody to see. And then they let people say, no, I don't want that. Or yes, I do want that. And they use all of that to direct the evolution of their business.
• 15:48
  I'm not a coach and I'm not a, you know, a personal guide. But it kind of makes me think about, you know, our family and friends are our communities. How often do we follow a path that the people that know and love us best are like, don't do that. Yeah.
• 16:11
  But we just think, no, I got it all figured out and we don't put that trust in those people. And I think that's another thing, like creating high trust environments, what Visual Studio Code did and what Xbox did to gain the success they have with their communities. They created and maintain high trust with those communities.
• 16:37
  by being transparent, by listening and responding, by sharing what they're going to do. I think that translates really nicely into our personal world. Like, create your high trust community and then for the love of God, listen to them.
• 16:54
  It's so simple yet it's so hard. I always say God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason. And yet I talk so much and it drives, I will go into meetings, Joanne, and I'll be like, just listen, just listen. And then I'll walk out and I'll dominate the conversation.
• 17:09
  Why? And it used to be because I was young and I would overcompensate, but I'm old now and I have experience. But I just, that's why I see the, that's why I see our innovation going through the roof. Because I have quieted down and allowed people to speak and I listen and I pare it back to them and everyone has a voice.
• 17:33
  Let's talk some truth. Disruption sounds sexy. Innovation is on every corporate website. But you and I know most people don't actually want to change. What separates the true disruptors from the protectors of the status quo? Mostly?
• 17:51
  And Dean and I, my co-author, Dean Kerrigan and I, when we set out to write this book, we had two things we asserted at the beginning. We're like, we're not going to name names, which if you read the book, we name a lot of names. We quickly figured out you couldn't tell these stories in a meaningful way without telling who the people were. And then we also said we're not going to make it a book about culture.
• 18:20
  No. Everybody talks about culture. And honestly, if you step back from the book as a whole, it is a conversation about the evolution of culture at the Microsoft level and at the business unit level. And you can see where the culture went awry and we missed big opportunities like search and the mobile platform. Yeah.
• 18:48
  And the Xbox One launch was us losing sight of the customer, which is that core culture of lead with X. They stopped leading with X for a little bit and it cost them like a decade of their dominant position in the market.
• 19:05
  And so a lot of people, a lot of leaders, myself included, I'll be honest, I have started many a business starting with the what I want to build. My most recent endeavor, I started with who. I said, who do I want to build with?
• 19:24
  Who are those high trust people? Who are those people that when we get in a room, I'm more excited to hear what they have to say than what I'm thinking? Because they're brilliant. That's a cultural evolution I've come through. And I think the book was a big help for it. Just solidifying it. But it does come down to how do you work together?
• 19:47
  Who gets to talk in the meetings? Whose ideas? How do you treat ideas? Do you treat them as something to be judged or something to be tested? And how do you reward risk-taking? That's a big part of it. You know, for Microsoft to do what it's done, it had a look at Microsoft Research and other parts of the company and say, this group is going to get a lot wrong and we can't
• 20:17
  We can't punish them for that. We need them to be wrong a lot. Because when they finally get through to write, it's going to be big. And so what they did was start rewarding the decision-making process. If you did something and it failed, but you could show how it was a sound path to follow and you made good decisions, that's a victory. Because we've learned something.
• 20:47
  So good. You have me when you talk, I get 35 questions in my head and I, but I have to sit there and listen because I love everything you're saying. You're just giving some gems build with who judged or tested. We all fear to be judged and, and whether we mean to do it or not, it just, it sounds like it. Certain people growing up in different households, um,
• 21:12
  Fear, even tonality of how it is. So I stress emotional intelligence everywhere. So we realize that, you know, false evidence appearing real. That's fear in my book. So just because you hear me question something in my voice, it doesn't mean that I'm judging you. It's literally I just that's just the way I speak. So there's two parts of this.
• 21:35
  Since I've been introduced to this book and first heard you that we've already implemented at National Technology Management, number one is we've started an innovative team. We pulled people out and their job is to automate. It's all they do now. And so far, it's only been a month and they're automating so much daily, it's insane. It's so easy now. We took our controller.
• 22:00
  and said, he was one of the most brilliant men in the company, and we said automate all AR, AP, all controller functions. And he looked at me like I was crazy. And then now he's been doing it for a month, he's like, oh my goodness. And he's showing me the progress. I'm like, you don't have to show me the progress. I just know you get there. That was one of them. The second one we're gonna implement in July, which is giving them, did you call it innovation weeks? Where- Yeah, think week.
• 22:25
  send them home, and everyone was like, where are you coming up with this? I said, here's the books that I read. And I said, wait till we have Joanne on. You're gonna love her. But it all boils down to culture. You started talking about it. You say innovation is bigger than tech. It's emotional, it's cultural. I agree 100%, especially when we're trying to scale. How do we build teams and relationships that pull innovation forward
• 22:54
  Instead of blocking besides the emotional intelligence that I just said, give me more ideas because this is a gem. I hope everybody's listening to this. This may seem totally opposite of heart and life, but this stuff, what she's talking about is harder than life. But it really is simple. It's just hard to do.
• 23:11
  And when you succeed at it, it becomes so fun and joyful. Like your world just opens up like, I feel really fortunate that like, I'll frame it two ways. One, my life is 99% failure. I make a living in innovation. So like I get rejected and I fail all day, every day. But
• 23:39
  I know enough about the process and I have confidence in the process so that that's not me failing. That's the thing of failing. And there's this detachment from it that is a healthy detachment.
• 23:57
  And I had a great conversation with Michael Gervais on Finding Mastery. And he has that framework of fear of other people's opinion. And you really have to deal with that FOPO to tap into the joy of creativity and innovation and collaboration.
• 24:17
  It is so many little things. It's not big things. So, for instance, in the developer division at Microsoft, which is the group that has Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio, so all are developer platforms, but they also have GitHub and a bunch of other things, like big, serving billions, right?
• 24:42
  They don't call things ideas. If you have a proposal, it's a hypothesis. And that's the word they use to tap into that scientific mind of hypothesis. It's more of a question than an assertion.
• 25:02
  I think this might be something. Let's figure out if it is or not. And by doing that every day in every conversation over the years, you get out of that immediate connection for some people that sharing an idea is scary. And you shift them into hypotheses are supposed to be questions and I'm not supposed to know the answer. It's supposed to be something to learn. Yeah.
• 25:30
  So there's a hundred of those examples in the language people use, in the processes they adopt. Another one is a lot of our developer teams don't release product and they don't launch product. Because release is like, I'm setting it free into the wild, never to be seen again. Yeah.
• 25:53
  And launch sounds like, you know, a rocket ship. And well, we all know those blow up, right? They're these big deals and there's a lot of stress and you don't want it to blow up. They call it a flight. They're like, we're going to flight this set of features, which means we're going to take off, put them out into the world, see how they do, land them, review the flight as a team, see what worked, what didn't. And then launch.
• 26:22
  fly again. And it just gives this tiny bit of psychological safety. Like you can't just say, I want a psychologically safe environment. You have to actually do all of these little things that create that. I immediately, when you said that, would write it down first of all. And then I started thinking of how much softer it sounds to say to somebody, I have this hypothesis that we can build a whole cybersecurity company around Microsoft.
• 26:52
  It sounds a lot better than we're gonna build this around Microsoft and everyone look at me like I'm crazy. But I have a hypothesis that we can leverage Microsoft cybersecurity products to move us to the next level, which we have, by the way. Two little gifts I'm gonna give you. One you'll know, it's none of my business what anybody thinks about me. Remind people of that one. And then the other one is don't take anything personal. I live by that. Don't take anything, it's never about you.
• 27:20
  And it's hard. That one's hard. Very hard. There's a third one that kind of don't make assumptions because, you know, when your hypothesis, we're kind of making assumptions, but don't make assumptions about their assumptions. A good trick we use is document your assumptions. Write them down.
• 27:39
  And then as you're moving through testing your hypothesis, because hopefully if you approach somebody and say, hey, I have this hypothesis, your partner responds, oh, how might we prove that or disprove that? Right? Because now it's just keeping it open. It's not, oh, we tried that. Don't do that. Or that would never work. Those people, you need to put them down the line in innovation because...
• 28:06
  They fare better in the skeptical phase. But in that beginning phase, you want people that approach everything as questioning and expansion. And so if you come back to me and I say, you give me your hypothesis, how might we test that? When we start designing our tasks, let's write down the assumptions that
• 28:32
  And then when we get the results from our test, let's go back and check our assumptions. Did any of them change? Do we know something we didn't know before? This is a process called double loop learning. Most people in innovation fail because they have a set of assumptions that they may or may not know because they didn't take the time to document them.
• 28:55
  They start building off of them and they never take the time to loop back and check their assumptions to see what's changed. It's a magical thing to do. I remember a long lost way to move forward was to try to disprove something. And I think we've run with that.
• 29:15
  Where you go, the opposite is true. Let me try to find it, see if the opposite is true. So what I'm getting at is we get programmed in our social media feeds, in all of our news, everything on what we already know. So it takes a big time.
• 29:32
  big mind to think outside the box and say, this could be true. I don't know. I, even though that everything tells me it might not be. So I just implore people to listen to what she's saying and what I'm saying, because this is how the world is going to change and change for the better. One of our core values is continuous improvement. And with everything being in the cloud, just because something was that way yesterday, doesn't mean it was today. Yesterday, Microsoft released in Teams, co-pilot.
• 30:01
  At least it updated on our stuff. So just because you thought it was some way and you've seen it that way forever does not mean that today that is true. So we have to go back and trust but verify everything. Which takes us to being comfortable failing forward. And I'm always saying fail forward and fail fast. What's the time that Microsoft blew it out in innovation and how did they pivot or recover? Because that's where the real wisdom lives.
• 30:30
  We, Dean and I both, love the cognitive services story because it was on the heels of two failures. What we say is we got Googled twice. So Google, back in the browser war era...
• 30:49
  when Netscape was the number one browser and all these things, and everybody was building web portals, Microsoft came out, fast-followed Netscape, and built Internet Explorer and won the browser war. But that wasn't actually the war to be won. Search was. And Google launched Search in this whole new way.
• 31:14
  and created a business that nobody has been able to unseat since they launched. And it just, it was a loss that the whole company felt.
• 31:25
  And so just to keep going on that, you know, we created Bing. We iterated on Bing five, six different ways. And we did all these other things, but we couldn't make a dent in search. And then in the midst of it, Apple comes out with the iPhone. And a few months later, Google comes out with Android and gives it away for free. And now Windows Mobile is sitting there going, how do we compete with free?
• 31:56
  And so they got Googled again. That could have been the end for a lot of companies. But what Harry Shum, one of the executives at Microsoft did, was he looked around and he said, hey, we've got Bing. We've got this platform called Azure. We've got Microsoft Research, these AI scientists that have been developing this technology and our understanding of it for decades.
• 32:27
  What can we do with that? And they tasked a handful, like six to 10 junior employees. These weren't even like senior leaders. These were junior employees. And they said, these are the three business units we have. We must have something we can do. What is it?
• 32:50
  And they went out and within a couple of months by connecting dots across the organization, across seven lines of business, they created AI as a service. Everything we're doing today with ChatGPT and the rest of these AI services is built on that backbone. So we lost. We got our butt kicked in search. Then we got our butt kicked again in mobile.
• 33:17
  But we got parts and we've got lessons and we've got people. How do we put it together a different way so that we find a path forward that works for us? That was what the leadership did. I would tell you, too, it's going to come full circle because search is going to change as we know it. Google. I love how you guys call it.
• 33:37
  Google is about to get Googled because there is a lot of people, myself included, saying stop using Google for everything. Start using your AI. We're a little ahead of it, but I'd prefer to get that than whoever's paying Google's highest price to get included in your search. But they stumbled on something that was brilliant that they've made a lot of money on.
• 34:02
  And for years, Google did well, but now I get frustrated. I don't even use it. It's just, it's so frustrating because you get their spin on everything. And I don't want their spin. I want it right down the middle or at least both sides. This is the opportunity for small and mid-sized companies. So Microsoft, even though it was big, its search business wasn't big. Like Bing was this tiny little fraction of our revenue. And so there was really no...
• 34:31
  existential risk for us to play with Bing and try to create AI as a service. Google gets 80% of their revenue from search. They cannot risk changing it dramatically. They have to be more cautious or they could blow up their business.
• 34:52
  This is why it's easier for small and mid-sized companies to experiment with these new tools to displace the big guys. Because you can carve out smaller, faster, more risk-tolerant and creative people into a small team to go automate your AR processes and whatever.
• 35:15
  And then displace somebody like Salesforce or one of the big platforms, right? Oh, we're disrupting. So I didn't even get into some of the coolest things. Stuff was when someone inevitably, you know, the hardest part about cybersecurity is keeping the end user. They click on things. They put their password on things. And...
• 35:36
  We have automated through AI when somebody clicks and opens their network to everything and all our alarms go off and we catch it. That used to be a three to six hour process of going through everything. It's now 30 seconds. Wow.
• 35:54
  And when we showed people how we did it, even the vendor said, how did you guys do that? Our innovation team that I got the inspiration from you. So this is where this comes from and it's wild. It would take hours and it's 30 seconds and we still bill quite a bit for it. But let's talk about this AI. We went that's when everyone, it's gonna hit hard. Real recently, the CEO of Fiverr said, AI is coming for all our jobs.
• 36:24
  You're an innovation expert. What do you say to that? Should we panic, pivot, or pounce? Ooh.
• 36:33
  Don't panic. A friend of mine just posted something, Lucas Joppa. I read his, he just gave a graduation speech to Duke, to the environmental school. And there's a lot of people studying the environment that have a lot of stress right now because of all kinds of things. And he said, action is the best anecdote to anxiety. And that's so true. So I would say, don't panic.
• 37:01
  pivot or pounce based on what level of risk you're comfortable with. Not everybody needs to pounce. I'm a pouncer.
• 37:13
  I am naturally inclined to think about the future I want and then work backwards from that picture to create it. So I do the work back of it's 2030 and my lab is a vibrant business with three to five key partners developing ideas.
• 37:38
  the regenerative future. All right. What had to be true in 2024 for that, you know, or 2029 for that to be the truth in 2030. And then what had to be true in 2028, 27, 26, 25. And I, I do that work back. That's, that's a pounce way of working in the world. Like, otherwise you're leaping off cliffs and you don't know where you're going to land.
• 38:06
  But the pivot way is fine as well. It takes a bit of self-reflection and honesty. We talked about this before the recording started. Look at what you do for a living and be honest. What about it is formulaic?
• 38:23
  What about it is a clear process. That is something that can be automated. And if you don't automate it by pivoting and automating it yourself, somebody else is going to automate it. And now you're in a pickle. But you have every ability to.
• 38:44
  These tools are built on natural language. You can literally turn the mic on on your computer and talk to it and say, I want to figure out how to automate this process that I do every day. Help me figure it out. And you can literally have AI help you build AI just by talking to it.
• 39:11
  You ain't lying, folks. Right? For me. You're not lying. We built websites in minutes. Oh, my gosh. It's amazing. I'm not a coder. Like, I learned Fortran in college, which is like it was a dead language when I learned it. My whole career of building technology, I'm like, should I learn how to code? I'm like, I don't think that's the best use of my time. That's just not what I'm good at. I have partners that excel at it. They are wonderful product developers.
• 39:41
  Now I can go from question, hypothesis, idea, to prototype in an hour. I can just sit there and play with AI and get to a prototype that helps me move the conversation forward so much faster than having to have conversations and write up specifications and offshore to developers.
• 40:08
  I can't productize it myself, but I can get to prototype and figure out whether it's viable. That, again, is a pouncing opportunity versus a pivoting opportunity. Now you're seeing how the heart of the life becomes a business. Because what you just said, we platform for all businesses. So the rule is you can be, if you don't want to pivot, a pivot could be partner with NTM.
• 40:36
  To be formulaic, we have to make sure that we have documented all of our standard operating procedures. We did all that. And so it was very easy to point an AI at and say, follow this procedure. Oh, in fact, make this a video for us and make it intuitive for our people. And then we didn't have coders, but we found an AI that can do it for us. And we wrote over the weekend a voice message.
• 41:03
  uh bot over the weekend it's guys this is incredible but what it what i would say is what before we hit record i want to say this if you want to come and do your eight and skate
• 41:14
  and mediocrity is what you want, you're gonna get left behind. We've got to innovate, we've gotta collaborate, and we've gotta grow. The formulaic, if you really take that formulaic, since you've said that word to me, it's gone in my head and I started thinking, think of all the day-to-day things that we're used to that really are formulaic right now. Buying any sort of real estate, any kind of a loan, any kind of a insurance,
• 41:44
  It's all for, so think of the billions of dollars that they're paying out for the middleman. Yeah. That's got to scare me. It should excite you. Like, think about how much we could simplify healthcare, right? And health insurance, billing and all of that, and just navigating. Like, I have a lot of elders in my family, you know, people 75 and older, right?
• 42:09
  Think about simplifying their interactions with the healthcare system. Yeah. That is such a vibrant opportunity to make people's lives better.
• 42:22
  Right. To take care of people. Yeah. And it shifts us from being like my whole career. I've said I, you know, I essentially my whole mission in life is to get rid of data monkeys like humans should not be data monkeys. It's not a good use of us. Think of all the data monkeys involved in health care today. Mm hmm.
• 42:47
  Think about having the ability to retrain the humans to take care of one another and let the AI be the data monkey. That's a world I want to live in. Like more caregivers, more teachers, more craftspeople building beautiful things. And like getting back to this world where another great quote.
• 43:16
  Of all people, Prince, the artist formerly known as, way back in the 90s, I think it was at the MTV Music Awards or the Grammys, computers were just and the Internet was just starting to become really something we all used.
• 43:34
  And Prince won an award and he stood up there and he's like, remember, you use the computer. Don't let the computer use you. But I really think over the last 20, 30 years, we've all become data monkeys. And now with this new evolution, we can go back to, no, the computer is a tool that we use. It doesn't use us.
• 43:58
  you have to use it to make your life better. And I wanna be specific about what I was talking about. I said, the only thing to be afraid of are the people that are,
• 44:05
  our average, everybody else in the world that, that want to come and want to learn and are aggressively striving to get better in this world. This is exciting because we're going to live at least to a hundred now, probably well into our hundreds because you're no longer going to go to the doctor and get his experience or her experience in her, in her mind. They're going to be able to feed it in and be able to scour the entire world and find the one case that matches yours and go, we got it.
• 44:35
  Yeah. And guys, this is going to be fun. And they're going to be able to see what other drugs that you're on from the from the this. It's just going to get fun. So I don't want to get too far because I get all geeky about it. You can tell we talked about.
• 44:52
  this and my audience and my national technology management, and it focused on small to medium sized businesses. They're hearing about AI and not sure. I met with an older guy yesterday. He's like, this is crazy. They gotta get rooms around it. So how can regular business owners, non-techies use AI as a tool? Tool, yes, you caught me. As a tool and not a threat.
• 45:15
  It starts with play. I'm not even kidding. Just pick one of the platforms. There's...
• 45:24
  Five or six really big platforms. I would stick to some of the bigger ones because of cybersecurity and personalization and control. You know, you can turn off whether they read your searches and your questions. And you can kind of just go in your own little bubble with the AI and just play with it. I don't know.
• 45:47
  I've had all kinds of businesses throughout my life, and I have friends that have all kinds of businesses. And I have a friend that owns a storefront in Philly that serves parents and children. And it's a playland. It's called Everland. It's a playland, and it has home goods. What she wants to spend her day doing is interacting with the parents and the children.
• 46:10
  And setting up classes and mommy and me yoga and musical introduction for children. And she wants to be in her space doing what she loves to do. But we all know we still got to do cash flow. We still got to do taxes. We still got to do permits. All of that laborious paperwork. Yeah.
• 46:36
  Go into your little AI bubble with your new toy, your new tool, and just start talking to it and saying, this is how I do my cash flow today. How can I do it better? How can I automate it? And just keep asking it questions until you get the answer that goes, oh, my God, yeah, that would make my life so much easier.
• 47:00
  That's all it takes. It's just play. Again, people that have never done it, just keep asking it questions. Can you make it better? It doesn't have to be anything profound. It's wild. Joanne, your eyes lit up when you talked about your friend in Philadelphia. Is it your friend or was it her job? Because you just lit up.
• 47:21
  I would say I love my community. So Philadelphia, I lived there for 20 years and I grew up in that area of the world. But what's really beautiful about Philly, and it's a blessing and a curse, is we don't have a lot of big business in Philly. We have a lot of mom and pop shops, the deli, the coffee shop, the storefront.
• 47:46
  But what that has behind it are all of these super creative people. Like, I lived on a block in South Philly that had a lawyer, a writer, a diplomat.
• 48:03
  a foundry owner. He pours giant molten metal sculptures, a graphic designer, a ballet teacher. So it's just like when I think about my Philly community and all of the ways that they have built community and business and make Philly what it is, that brings me joy.
• 48:26
  I don't know you for anybody, but I suggest you eventually get back there because something lit up in you that I hadn't seen. None of our discussion lit you up like that. So sorry. That's home. Yeah, that's home. The book talks about heart-centered leadership, and it starts about emotional innovation, leading with feeling. That's rare in corporate, but I think it's a superpower. How do we teach leaders to lean into emotion without losing their edge?
• 48:56
  And this is, you know, this is something that I'm learning from other people. The framework we share in Pattern Number Three, Innovating with Everyone, is a framework that is based on decades of behavioral science and psychology. But it was brought together by a group called White Rhino.
• 49:16
  And they're a group that I fortunately met about a decade ago, and they started teaching me this practice. Maybe what it starts with is an appreciation of how we all move through change. And it's less a challenge to you having an edge or not, and you can see it more as an opportunity to realize your goal or your future you're trying to create.
• 49:46
  By understanding that we all go through this process of getting excited about something, visualizing it together, then validating the vision with data of some sort, whether that's by asking our friends, do they believe it? Is it possible or whatever? But it's cognitive at that point. Then.
• 50:12
  Making that choice to say, yeah, I'm going to buy into this. I'm excited about it. I can see it. My friends believe it. I'm going to go for it.
• 50:22
  Then we have another emotional moment of, oh, am I? Am I going to go for it? As an innovation person or a leader or anybody trying to drive change, if you can recognize that pattern and meet people where they're at and when they need to be excited, excite them. And when they need to be comforted and given confidence, give them confidence. Now you're going to help everybody move through that change more smoothly.
• 50:52
  That's what I think we should teach emotional intelligence in school now. It's more important than almost anything. I have one more quick question, and then we're going to do something we've never done before, a little small quick lightning round, but just quick and easy. Just you. Either way, I just want to tell you, I love your glasses. I can sit here and talk to you, and your creativity and your kindness, it's exuding through the computer screen. Thank you.
• 51:16
  Thank you for coming on today. One more question and then the lightning round. It's everyone wants quick hacks, but true innovation isn't a flash in the pan. How do we make innovation a discipline, not just a launch buzzword? Do it every day in little ways and big ways. And it's something we do. This is just human. Like think about where we've come as a species.
• 51:42
  Right? Like how much we've evolved. This is what we do. We are tool makers. We are creators. We are collaborators by nature. So tap into it in whatever opportunities you can with your kids. Play with your kids. Play with your dog. Go out and play with your friends. Even if you're 55, like play more.
• 52:07
  I forget to play so much nowadays. Everything is so serious and it's not. I don't know why. It's really weird. Thank you for that advice. That is so good. All right, we're going to do a quick lightning round. I got five quick things. First thing that comes to mind, don't have to explain it. Most overhyped innovation trend right now. AGI, Artificial General Intelligence. Wow.
• 52:29
  Oh, we could have a whole other podcast about that one. Well, I think there's a big debate in the community. Some people are like, we're going to be there in three years. And other people are like, no, we're never going to get there. And it's the idea that artificial intelligence can completely do everything that humans do. And I would, I am in the camp of, no, no.
• 52:55
  Because we don't understand how we do what we do. So how could we possibly program something to do it? That's my favorite line of the whole podcast. We don't understand how we do what we do. It's true. If we did, we would be better at it. Yes. True. All right. Next one. Last time you failed and how you got back up.
• 53:18
  Oh, I don't talk about this much. I really don't. I failed at Microsoft. I did. Not in whole. That's the beauty of things. There's always dimensions. You know, we have a beautiful book to show for it. We have the Regenerative Data Center to show for it. I got treated really well through a battle with cancer, and the company took good care of me through it.
• 53:47
  But as far as like building a career at Microsoft, I failed. I didn't play the game. I didn't understand the rules of the politics and how it all works inside of a corporation that big with that many people. And I just tried to do me. I just tried to like show up and do the things I do as an entrepreneur.
• 54:12
  And I got my hat handed to me numerous times. Right. I'm sure you've heard this, that they've said everything happens the way it's supposed to happen. Yes. And like I said, 99% of my life is failure. I learned a ton from that. And I don't, I actually love my relationship with the company now more than I ever did when I was a full-time employee. I can tell you our relationship's gotten a lot better. Um.
• 54:41
  I used to, they've come a long way in my book and we built a whole company around it now. So what do you tell yourself before a high stakes pitch? Whenever I speak, whether it's in a pitch or a talk, a public talk, I remind myself that we're all human and I go and I share what I know and I ask questions. I don't put a lot of pressure on,
• 55:10
  or much pressure on having it work. You know, there's a saying in Philly, I'm just talking. Like, I'm just talking. I'm coming in. And if I've been invited in, it's even easier, which is usually the only times I do things. I'm not one to push through doors. That's just not my personality. If I've been invited in, then I'm like, hey, they invited me here. So I'm welcome. And I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna talk.
• 55:38
  I was just going to say, it's just a Philly girl that is honest and absolutely forthright. So I've loved this conversation. I may ask you to come have a talk with my team because they will love you. Love you. Oh, that would be great. I love you. They'll love you. So last lightning questions. Who needs this book the most and who won't get it? Ooh, I think the mediocre, I'll start with the second part, the mediocre senior leaders are...
• 56:07
  Because there's a lot of them. I was there. Oh, that's pretty honest. You didn't feel like you were a top-notch senior leader? No, I was the bottleneck for years. Oh, wow. I could have broke this. That's how this became harder than life. Because I was harder than life. I'm tough, tough, tough, tough. And when I finally stopped trying to control everything, I became happier than life. Yes. That's the next book.
• 56:34
  Oh, I had to go through cancer to learn that lesson. They beat it out of you. They're like, you can't plan for this. This is going to be what it's going to be. And you got to roll with it. And I and it took they laughed at me. They're like, we see people like you all the time planners. They're like, you can't plan. But the mediocre senior leaders who have just risen on their own hot air, you know, because they look the part and sound the part.
• 57:04
  They're not going to get the book. They don't want to know what's in the book. And I hope you're right about the mediocre losing out in the next revolution. The people who get the book is anybody that's pretty practical at the end of the day. Dean and I said, you know, we don't want to write a book that's philosophical. We want to write what is essentially a reference manual. This is a book of tools.
• 57:30
  And you can flip it open, find a tool, apply it to a problem, see if it helps you solve the problem, try a different tool. And if you walk away, we figure there's about 50 tools in the book. If you walk away with two or three new ones in your toolbox, we feel like we've done our part.
• 57:48
  Joanne, this has been amazing. Your work is powerful. Story is badass. We didn't even get into the cancer stuff. And your book is a must read. Before we go, drop some wisdom on the Heart of Life Nation. What would you say to the leaders out there, especially those stuck on the edge of burnout, who know in their gut that there's something bigger in there for them? If you're stuck on the edge of burnout, take a break. It's really that easy.
• 58:14
  Take a break. I've taken a few breaks in my career, some six months, some two years. There's always like if you're willing to do the work, there's always money to be made. There's always work to be done. That's not the problem. If you're burnt out, nothing else is possible. So take a break, read a book, sleep in a hammock, take a walk.
• 58:40
  There's tremendous depth to you that I didn't even get to. Thanks for playing along. Harder Life Nation, that's what I'm talking about. Innovation isn't just for tech giants. It's for anyone bold enough to do the work like Joanne just said. Go get Joanne's book, The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft. All proceeds go to STEAM Education. This is how we rise together, smarter, faster, and harder than life. Until next week, I'll see you. And stay focused, stay bold, stay harder than life.
• 59:09
  Please rate and share this podcast. I'm active on all social platforms and love to hear from my Segal supporters. Each and every episode is sponsored by my company, National Technology Management, the easiest and best IT company to do business with, delivering peace of mind with technology every day, even simplifying cybersecurity. Visit TrustNTM.com for more info. Until next week, be harder than life.