>> Narrator: From the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE, covering ACG Silicon Valley Grow Awards. Brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. (electronic music) >> Welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the ACGSV, it's a mouthful. Association of Corporate Growth Silicon Valley Awards, the 14th annual. We've been coming here for about three years. We're really excited to have tonight's keynote speaker on, many time CUBE alum, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware. Pat, great to see you. >> Great to be here, Jeff, thank you so much. It's always great to be on theCUBE, and so many good friends from theCUBE and great interviews. I really enjoy you guys, thank you. >> We're excited for VMworld later this year, we've got Dell Technology World coming up next week, so... >> Just working on my keynote this morning, so almost ready to go, so. >> But you're going to keynote tonight, so what's your keynote tonight on? >> Well, tonight, it's about tech as a force for good. And I'm going to talk about what I call the four superpowers today. You know in the past, we thought of superpower, like, USSR and the USA. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Today I believe superpowers are far more powerful, and they're technology superpowers. And the four I talk about are mobile, unlimited reach, cloud, unlimited scale, A.I., unlimited intelligence, an IOT bridging from the digital to the physical world, and how those four superpowers are reinforcing each other today, and literally it's our opportunity to improve the quality of lives for every human on the planet as a result of those superpowers. And really how it's our responsibility as a tech community to shape those superpowers for good. >> It's so good to talk about the "for good" because there's so much bad in the news lately about some of the stuff that's going on, and you know, it's two sides of the same coin always. You can use it for good or you can use it for bad. And unfortunately, the bad has been in the news more than the good, but there's so many exciting things going on in medicine, healthcare, agriculture, energy. The opportunities are almost endless. >> Yeah, it really is, and as I say, technology is neutral. It can be used for good or bad. The Gutenberg Press. The Bible or Playboy, it works for both, and it really is our responsibility as a society, and I'll say even more so today as tech leaders, to be that force shaping those technological superpowers for good. You know, one of the statistics offside of my keynote, is in the last fifty years, we've taken the extreme poverty rate from over forty percent, to less than ten percent on the planet. It's stunning that we've lifted two and a half billion people out of extreme poverty. Healthcare reach, we've increased the length of life by almost twenty years on the planet, over the last fifty years. I mean, these are stunning things, and largely the result of the technological breakthroughs that we're doing, and as I say, today is the fastest day of tech evolution of your life. It's also the slowest day of tech evolution of the rest of your life. >> Of the rest of your life, pretty interesting. And with 5G coming just around the corner, kind of thinking of a world of infinite bandwidth, infinite compute, infinite store. How do you start to design applications and distribution when you can have all that power? And as you said, with cloud really at your disposal. You don't have to build it all yourself, you leverage companies like you guys to put it in place and I as an entrepreneur don't have to build all that stuff anymore. >> That's right, this really is impressive that way, 'cause today we've crossed over half the population of the planet has a persistent connection to the internet over some form of mobile or PC device. Half the population, you can now reach over the internet. I mean, it's just stunning that way. >> Jeff: Yeah. >> You can rent the world's largest super computer for a few thousand bucks. The scale that we're able to now conduct business to be able to develop software to reach customers, and truly to change people's lives. >> Right. You do a lot of work. I follow you on Twitter and you're out in the community, you do a lot of stuff with your faith and outside of work to help people. You see the power that you can bring to this technology. What are some of the inspiring stories that get you up everyday, when you do some of this stuff outside of your day job? >> It really is exciting and one of the charities that my wife and I are very involved in is called Missions of Hope International. They work in the slums of Nairobi primarily, and we help to start schools there that literally today have over fifteen thousand kids in the schools that we helped start. Over the summer, I'm climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, in July, as a fundraise to build the next girls high school for those schools. As the girls get younger, they get pulled back into tribalism. For five camels, they get married off at young ages, and keeping them in school so that they can really advance and become proper members of society versus drug into tribalism, so that's one of my summer projects is doing that. Particularly in Kenya, we've been thrilled, things like M-Pesa, and we work with a company called Node Africa, to deliver farming and agricultural services. You know, the most basic things that give people market access, give people cropped information, and literally are lifting people out of poverty in the country of Kenya today. >> That's great work and like I said, follow Pat on Twitter. You're pretty active on there doing good work. >> Thank you. >> We look forward to your keynote tonight and we'll see you next week in Las Vegas. >> Look forward to it. Thank you so much, Jeff. >> Alright, he's Pat Gelsinger, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from the ACGSV Awards. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: From the computer museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE. Covering ACG Silicon Valley Grow Awards brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in Mountain View, California at the ACGSV awards, the grow awards, 14th annual. We've been coming for a couple of years, about 300 people celebrating, really, there's a lot of networking, it's an interesting organization. Check it out, we're excited to have our next guest, he's Nick O'Keefe, partner of Arnold and Porter. Nick, great to see you. >> Likewise, great seeing you, great to talk to you. >> So we were talking a little bit off camera, you came to Silicon Valley in 2000, and were saying you seen a lot of changes in those 18 years. >> Yeah it's phenomenal, it's epitomized by the great gathering that we have here today. As I was saying earlier, when I came, I worked in Silicon Alley. Silicon Valley was sort of a bigger version of Silicon Alley and it's just kept growing. You know, the practice between East Coast and West Coast is converged. I mean, there's some of the biggest most successful companies in the world are based here now, and some of the biggest deals. It's just incredible in a short period of time how that's happened. As I was saying earlier, you know, one of the things that really opened my mind, opened my eyes to how successful Silicon Valley is, is I opened up the Middle East offices to another law firm right around the time of the Great Recession. And it's seems like every country is trying to emulate Silicon Valley. We advised on how they can replicate it, what kind of laws they'd have to put in place, what kind of ecosystem they'd have to build. And there's just something really unique here that's really difficult to emulate in different countries-- >> Right because it's all industries. Right, all industries tend to aggregate and congregate around a usually a specific location, or one or two. You think of financial services in New York and London. Because you get the people, and those people leave and start new companies. You have the schools that drive people in their associates. It's tough, it's tough to replicate a whole ecosystem if you don't have all those components, and then, as it gels for a awhile, I think the barriers to entry become even higher. So, you get different versions of it, but really not the same. >> Yeah that's right, I mean, we have all the ingredients here, we have the great educational institutions, you know, Berkeley, Stanford. You have the financial institutions or the venture money. Very sophisticated population, it's just wonderful living here. Just so many smart people around, you can't just lift them up and put them somewhere else, they all have ties in the community. It's just very tough. What's interesting about financial services you mentioned, typically that's a New York-based practice, but with Fintech, you're seeing some of that migrate over here. Cryptocurrencies, a lot of that technology is being developed here, and that's really a convergence of financial services and tech, and Silicon Valley is the hub of that. >> Yeah, I really think that Stanford and Cal don't get enough credit. And Santa Clara and some of the other schools, but those two particularly, because they attract really great talent. They come, their weather's great, they've got a culture of innovation, they've got very nice connections with the local business community, so people don't leave. So you got this constant influx of smart people, and they stay, where a lot of other places, even great academic institutions don't necessarily have the business climate, the weather climate, or kind of the ecosystem to keep their brightest, it's there locally. So I think that's just a huge driver. >> Yeah absolutely, I completely agree. And there's, even if they don't stay, they still maintain their ties here. You know, people all over the world come to study here, as you're indicating. You know, I'm doing a deal currently with some Chinese people who did graduate research locally, and they formed a very successful start-up in China, where currently, we're doing a deal with. And the fact that Stanford, they couldn't be where they were if they hadn't gone through Stanford, and they develop ties with the region, and with the companies in the regions, so they're very much, sort of a diaspora of Silicon Valley, the way they've operated it. >> Right, what is your take on China? 'Cause to me, China's the big competitor. That's the one, I think, where there's the potential because they got a huge internal market, they're really good at fast following, and you look at Alibaba Cloud, and some of the big, big players over there. I think that's really where the biggest threat to the current US incumbents is going to come. >> It's very interesting, it's sort of two, two faceted. On the one hand, obviously, a huge population, and as the country develops, I mean, ultimately within the fairly near future, the Gross National Product is expected to overtake the US. But you have sort of a different culture, and they have the same challenges as everyone else does, this sort of replicating Silicon Valley, I don't think they'll ever take Silicon Valley, you know, take the crown away from them. And I think, what I'm seeing now in a couple of deals is, so the current administration is obviously trying to defend the US trade position, but it's having deleterious effects in that it's preventing Silicon Valley companies from growing and from doing deals. You know, a lot of the Chinese funds they're lucky to invest in the US, where there's currently some regulations that are expected to be proposed next month that could inhibit Chinese investment in the US. Now that's not good for Silicon Valley, so the attempt is to, sort of, protect the US economy, but, you know, I can see certain effects that are happening that are not helpful. It's interesting, there's sort of a symbiotic relationship between development here in the US, and development in other countries, and it's difficult to fight it 'cause you're going to have weird effects. You know, I think the US, it's just a unique country. You know, I think it'll always be unique, and I personally, I don't have a fear that China is going to somehow usurp the position the US occupies, or India, or other huge country, I'm just very polished on Silicon Valley, and the US generally. >> Yeah it is amazing 'cause I've been here a little longer than you, and it just, it just keeps reinventing, right? It's just wave after wave after wave, it was originally silicon and microprocessors, and then it's software, and then it's IOT. And now, you see all the automotive people have innovation centers here. So wave after wave after wave, just continues to come, and then we're going to have, you know, 5G, and it's this whole move to asymptomatically approaching zero cost of store, compute, and networking, and infinite, basically, amounts of those on tap. It really opens up a huge opportunity. >> It really does, yeah, and it's, a lot of it's going to come from here. >> Alright Nick, well thanks for taking a few minutes of your time, and stopping by. >> You bet, my pleasure. >> Alright he's Nick O'Keefe, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE, from the ACGSV awards, Grow Awards in Mountain View, California. Thanks for watching. (digital music)

(electronic music) >> Announcer: From the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE covering ACG Silicon Valley GROW! Awards. Brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, for the 14th Annual Association of Corporate Growth Silicon Valley GROW! Awards. We've been here for a couple of years now, and it's a big event, 300 people coming in to talk about an ecosystem of helping other companies grow. And we're excited to have the new CEO, Drue Freeman. Drew, great to meet you. >> Thanks Jeff, pleasure to be here. >> So you've been here two months, I think. What attracted you to the opportunity? >> It's kind of an exciting organization, actually. I've been working with ACG Silicon Valley for a little while now doing some programming with them around autonomous driving and the connected car. And I got to know my predecessor, Sally Pera, through that and through the course of discussions-- She's a wonderful salesperson, she kind of sucked me into the role and here I am. >> Jeff Frick: What is the mission, for people that aren't familiar with ACG? >> Essentially what we are is an organization that's dedicated towards providing networking opportunities, education opportunities, programming for C-Level executives, and other senior-level executives at companies to help them develop their career and also grow their businesses. >> Like you said, Sally's been at it for 13 years, she's stepping out of the role, which opened up the opportunity for you. What's your charter now, as you take the baton from Sally? Fresh enthusiasm, fresh energy, fresh face. What are you excited about? >> Of course, it sounds silly, but to take things to the next level, whatever that means, to try to identify a vision for the organization, going forward. Maybe find some new areas to develop content around. Attract some sponsors in the technology domain, and bring content that will maybe continue the Thought Leadership area. We are recognized as a Thought Leadership within the community here in Silicon Valley, and also within the greater ACG community. But we want to really kind of notch that up a little bit. We're bringing in some university sponsorship now and really looking at some of the leading edge areas that Silicon Valley is on the tip of the spear of, essentially, globally, for innovation. We want to make sure that we're putting that content out really to our community. >> Right. And this is the GROW! Awards, this is an awards banquet, a celebration tonight, but you guys do a number of different types of events throughout the year. What are some of the formats of the different ways that people can get involved? >> The one that most people are aware of is our keynote panels because those are open to a larger audience. Typically we get about 100 people there at these events. We bring in a panel of experts and we have a discussion on some topic that's quite current at the moment. But we also have a Public Board Circle, where people who are on public boards of publicly traded companies will have a discussion within that smaller group of people about relevant topics. We have a C-Suite Circle, where C-Level executives come together. We bring in outside experts that will come in and talk about things like economic trends or whatever the current issues are, and then they have a robust discussion around that topic. We have an MNA Circle. We also have an accelerator environment, where we have younger companies, sometimes start-ups, sometimes mid-market companies, where we bring in some experts that kind of help them pop the hood and look at what some of the strategic issues are that they might be facing, et cetera. >> Okay, so that's all great, but let's talk about the stuff I know you're passionate about and is so fun right now, that's autonomous vehicles. It's a really crazy time in the industry. You've got changes in the players. You've got changes in the propulsion. You've got changes in the ownership structure. You've got so many changes happening in the autonomous vehicle space and all the ecosystem around it. I'd just love to get your impressions. You've been playing in that space for a long time, in the automotive space, but to see the changes really accelerate driven in a large part, obviously, by Tesla and Elon Musk. And we're here at the Computer History Museum. They've got that great little display over there with the Google cars. Which they now weigh more and they have to keep changing them out because it went from the little bug-looking thing, now they're driving the vans. I'd love to get your impressions as to the speed, some surprises, not surprises, as we see this autonomous vehicle trend coming down the pipe. >> Technology is evolving at a remarkable speed. That's being driven largely by the availability of increased processing power. You need to address the data bandwidth power, as well. You've got to move a lot of different data around the car to address this technology. And that's really pushing the envelope of what cars can do. The industry itself still needs to make sure they can bring that to the market in a way that the market will accept. That people in Main Street, USA, or Main Street, Europe, or Main Street, Asia are going to be comfortable driving in. Car ownership is going to change a little bit, especially in urban areas. People may not choose to buy a car in the urban areas. They might choose to do carsharing. But in the Midwest, I think car ownership is still going to be a key element, and it's not clear yet how ready people are to have a self-driving car as part of their own ownership. The technology, while we can demonstrate it works, still needs to be demonstrated that it works in a way that makes people feel comfortable. And so, I think there's still a lot of innovation to be done in the software, in the AI, the machine learning, that makes people feel comfortable with that. And there's a lot of great companies working on that. I'm amazed every day at the companies developing not only the sensors and things that enable the perception of the vehicle to improve, but also the AI around that. But honestly, I think the roll-out in-- Making it available to you and I on the street it's going to be a lot slower than I think a lot of us have been thinking about for a while. >> Yeah. The trust issue is so interesting to me. 'Cause on one hand, people do have to have some trust and we've talked to Phantom Auto and some other companies that are trying to kind of insert a person back in at some point in time to help with that trust. On the other hand, you have people driving the Teslas especially, or at least that's the ones we hear the most about, that's a level two assist that people are treating like a level five fully autonomous vehicle. And unfortunately, there's been some fatalities and they're not level five vehicles. So it's really two opposite extremes, that we see people and their interaction with these things. They want it to be fully autonomous today, and it's not but people are treating them that way. It's weird. >> Yeah, and I think that's one of the risks, right? I think level three is one area where I really think you probably will not see a lot of. I think level four, where you can basically have fully autonomous but in a geo-fenced area, will I think be the first area that really takes off. So on campuses, in maybe urban areas that are fenced off from other vehicles. I think you will see that develop first. I don't think mixed-mode traffic where you have a lot of vehicles where they're fully autonomous but you're going to expect the driver to be paying attention all the time and willing to take over the vehicle at any minute. I don't think that works. The human brain doesn't work that way. >> No, it doesn't work. It's funny, we were at a Ford event, and it was a press event so they had the sample driver guy ready to go, and they had a guy sitting in the right seat with a laptop, checking things out. And this poor guy in the left seat, he had his hands half an inch from the wheel on both side, just completely alert and ready to go. You couldn't do this for more than fifteen minutes or twenty minutes. It was the worst of all worlds for this poor guy. It is going to be interesting, that intermediate phase, and it's going to be complicated, but it's clearly coming at an incredible rate of speed. >> Right. Exactly. And then you also have to manage-- How do you manage the traffic when you have mixed mode, when you have human-driven vehicles combined with autonomous vehicles? How do the autonomous vehicles react to the human-driven vehicles and how do the humans react to autonomous-driven vehicles? And we haven't really figured that out yet. >> Right, and then there's all the other law of unintended consequences with, what do you do with the parking structures? I think curb management is an interesting thing that's really been highlighted lately in San Francisco with all the electric scooters that are now littering the sidewalks, which nobody ever really thought about when they rolled out hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of these scooters all over San Fransisco. Good opportunities and crazy times ahead. >> And that's the beauty of this, right? All of these things actually create opportunities, you just have to stick with it and look at solutions, and there's no shortage of really talented, creative people to go address these opportunities. And it is so fun to be involved in it right now. >> Alright, Drue, well congrats on your new position, and we look forward to watching ACGSV evolve. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright, he's Drue Freeman and I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from the 14th Annual GROW! Awards. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: From the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCube, covering ACG Silicon Valley GROW! Awards, brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're at the ACG SV 14th Annual GROW! Awards. It's their big annual event, about 300 people here at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. We're excited to have one of the board members join us. She's Anita Ganti, SVP and Global Head of Product Engineering Services, for Wipro, and a board member, welcome. >> Thank you, thank you for having me here. >> So how long have you been involved in this organization? >> Not very long. It's just a little over a year. >> All right, and what attracted you to it? >> I actually got introduced by a friend. She connected me to the board of ACG, and I could see what the organization was doing in terms of bringing more growth, more energy here in the Silicon Valley, not that we don't have enough already, but I'm very passionate about it, and so I was really glad to be introduced and brought into the fold, so to speak. >> All right, good. So I'm going to set you up, I did a little research before we have you on, famous Jeffrey Hammerbacher quote, you probably know what I'm going to say, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about "how to make people click on ads, and it sucks." You're all about using tech for good, that's what you're passionate about. Not just using it to get people to click ads, but really doing some meaningful work around meaningful things. What are some of your favorite projects you're working on? >> I'll just clarify, right? It's that clicking on ads is a bad thing. I mean, people do need to buy, we need to get commerce going and all that. But with all the technology that we have access to, it seems such a shame that we are not paying attention to real world problems, larger world problems. I think global warming is something that's real. I'm in the camp that believes that it's very real. And there's a lot of harm that some aspects of technology have cost our planet. It's important to really look at not just the First World problems those of us here in the Silicon Valley see every day, but really open our eyes to what's happening in other parts of the globe. The need for water, clean water, water filtration, clean air, combating some of the changes that have been created as a consequence of global warming, having access to information, education. So these are some things that are really personally dear to me. >> Right, right. So we've done some stuff with the Western Digital. I know SAP is part of this work with the United Nations for some of their really big, global goals that they're addressing. A lot of them you talked about. Simple things: water, access to information, better food production. There's so much inefficiency in Ag that we see that people are applying technology to. So there is a real opportunity and we are seeing, I think, some movements into that area. >> Absolutely. And it doesn't always have to be done by the corporate arm that's focused on social issues. We can do that as engineers who are working just in our day-to-day lives. We could be looking for ways in which we apply things like IOT, Internet of Things, to providing services as a service to enable smart cities. Really look for avenues in which we look at technologies that are available to us every day and then just like people invest in social causes without really looking at it as philanthropy, look for for-profit avenues, avenues to enable technology but then keeping the impact to our planet in mind. >> You guys deal with a ton of customers, right? You're out on the leading edge, you're helping people implement technology. So are you seeing people add that in, as kind of a, you think of a public works project or a building project, there's always some carve out for art or other things to keep cities beautiful. Is there similar type of thing you're seeing for social good in some of these projects where there's some carve out, some allocation, to make sure that that base is being covered? >> No, what I want to say is you don't have to think of it as a carve out. You can make that as a part of your mission in what you do. So here in the Silicon Valley we are creating so much technology and all that technology has multiple applications. It's like both sides of the coin. And if we are making technology available for artificial intelligence machine learning, we're creating technology to do things like block chain authentication, distributed ledger, it's just about opening our minds a little bit and then taking those products, taking that technology to other markets. There are in many ways the technology-haves and the technology-have-nots. >> Absolutely. >> A lot of it is not just about making the product but then taking the product you made and then implementing it in various use cases that really make a change come about in the world. So that's something that I'm very passionate about. >> All right, Anita, well thank you for taking a few minutes to stop by and give us the update. And really excited for doing tech for good because we hear so much about the bad these days. So thanks for your time. >> Thank you. My pleasure. >> She's Anita Ganti. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCube from the ACG SV Awards, Mountain View California. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California, it's the CUBE, covering ACG Silicon Valley Grow! Awards. Brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the CUBE, we're at the ACGSV, the 14th annual Grow! Awards, Mountain View California. They're just about ready to pull everybody into the keynotes and we are able to squeeze in one more interview. Excited to have Christian Kim, SVP of sales from Dell EMC. Christian, great to meet you. >> Thank you Jeff, good to be here. >> Absolutely, so you know, Dell, EMC merger took place about a year and a half of so ago, seems like it's doing really well, we'll have Michael on next week; we'll be at Dell Tech World in Vegas. >> Excellent. >> And so you're out on the front line, you're out in the sales role. How's it going out there? What's going on with the merger? How are customers digging it? How do you like having all those extra resources at your disposal? >> Well, I would say Jeff, it's a great question. The integration and the merger has gone exceptionally well, in my opinion in our first year. I think when you put the two big companies together like that, generally there's going to be a few bumps in the road but I would say the reception from our customer base has been very positive. I think the biggest thing that we see is, just the whole "better together" message, that all of the resources from the strategically aligned businesses like Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, Vmware, VirtuStream, RSA, and SecureWorks all working together to support the customers. >> Pretty amazing group of companies. We've just had Pat on a little while ago, you know, there was a lot of concern a couple years ago, 'what's going on with Vmware?'and they've really done a great job kind of turning that around, getting together with Amazon and that partnership RSA was last week, 45,000 people. Hot, hot hot in the security space and obviously Pivotal just did their IPO, right, last week. >> They did, yes. >> So you guys are in a good space, I mean, I remember when Michael first went private you could tell he was like a kid in a candy store, right, as he's talked about the '90-day shot clock' they didn't have to worry about it anymore. And so, you know, having an aggressive founder as the leader, I think really puts you guys in a great position. >> It does. When the founder's name's on the building, I think generally it sets a good tone for the culture and the objectives for all of the employees across Dell Technologies. >> And he's such a real guy, right? He tweets all the time, he's really out there and I always find it interesting that there's certain executives that like to tweet, that like to be social. Beth Comstock is another one that comes to mind. Pat tweets a little bit when he's really doing some of his philanthropic things, Michael does as well. And then you have other people that are scared of it, but Michael really wants to be part of the community, he tweeted out today his condolences around the crazy tragedy up in Toronto, so it's really nice to have a person running the organization. >> Yeah, he's a very active CEO and Chairman. Likes to be in front of customers, very involved with the employee base, I couldn't ask for anything more. >> Alright, so we're almost out of time, priorities for 2018, we're, hard to believe, a third of the way through, what are some of your priorities, what are you guys working on, what's top of mind? >> I'd say our priorities are certainly customer focused, focusing on business outcomes, the four areas that we really drive and work closely with our customers on are all about digital transformation, IT transformation, security transformation, and workforce transformation. Those are the big things for us this year. >> It's a good place to be. >> Thank you very much Sir. >> Well Christian, we've got to leave it there, they're shooing everybody into the keynote room so thanks for taking a minute. >> You got it. My pleasure. >> He's Christian Kim, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching the CUBE from the ACGSV Awards, Mountain View California. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE. Covering AGC Silicon Valley GROW! Awards. Brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. The program is just about to begin here at the ACGSV GROW! Awards, 14th Annual. We're excited to be here for our third year. 300 people are going to be giving out some hardware here shortly. But, before we do that we're excited to have Alex Wolf, all the way up from Santa Cruz. He's the dean of the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. Welcome, Alex. >> Thank you very much, it's great to be here. >> Absolutely. So, what do you think of this organization? How did you get involved? >> Well, it's been great for us. We've been drawn in by some great alumni who have been involved with the organization, and they're interested in helping Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz School of Engineering, and partnering with ACG is just a perfect way to do it. >> Excellent. So, I was doing a little homework, obviously, before you came on. I was looking through the curriculum of the school, the engineering school, and you've got CS and E, and all the normal stuff, but two things jumped out to me, biomolecular engineering and computational media. >> That's right. >> What are those disciplines? >> Well, let's start with biomolecular engineering. That's where we are doing a lot of work in health and life. Santa Cruz is famous for one particular thing that happened a number of years ago, which was the sequencing of the human genome. Now, Santa Cruz played a huge role in that. This was the place where we were able to assemble the human genome for the first time, and publish it on the web. >> What year was that? >> That was 2003. >> And back then it took massive amount of computer, massive amount of time. >> Lots of time, millions and millions of dollars. This was a project that was run by the government. Many partners and Santa Cruz researchers in School of Engineering were able to crack that nut and get this genome sequenced. >> And now we can do it-- Now, it's getting cheaper and cheaper, we've got researchers who've been working on that, we've spun out a bunch of companies that have worked on less and less expensive, faster and faster sequencing techniques. >> Really, with the goal to get to individualized medicine, right, to get to individualized treatment. >> That's right, personalized medicine, precision medicine, that's the goal. It's amazing what you can do if you know the genome history, if you can apply that to the drug treatments, it's fantastic. >> I think medical science is so interesting, because from whatever point you are, you look back 10 years and it looks like bloodletting. No matter what we do today, in 10 years from now, we're going to look back >> It's true at cancer treatment, like we give people poison until they almost die, >> That's right. >> that's the way we treat 'em? >> That's right, and the genome will tell you so much about that cancer treatment. We're doing other things too, in stem cell and nanopore technology, so there's just a wonderful set of technologies that people are inventing in the school. >> Great, now what about computational media? >> Computational media is a rather different thing. That is a concept where we're looking at how media can be generated through algorithms, and this has very interesting applications in the game industry, in journalism, in many parts of our interaction with humans. It's great to be able to have a computer that really understands how to generate meaningful, realistic text. >> What is the main benefit in some of the early research that you see, because we've seen some really simple versions of this out there, straight little app that kids play sports, you know, you finish the game, you hit the game over, and it generates a nice little article for you. >> Absolutely. You know, you mentioned personalization before. It's the same thing with computational media. You can get a game to be much more personalized to the player. It can understand that experience, understand the interests of the game player, and then tailor itself to that player. >> So, how much do you work with the psychology department in this world, because it's so much human factors, right? >> Absolutely. We have a great collaboration with psychology. That's really, really important. You know, the computational media department is actually going to be growing into Silicon Valley. You see Santa Cruz has recently opened a campus in Silicon Valley. >> Where? >> It's in Santa Clara, and we're right now hiring faculty into that campus. >> So, is it open then, or when will it be open? >> The facility is open. We held an ACG event there in January. We're going to be holding more of them there. It's a great location. >> Excellent. All right, well, maybe we'll have to come by and do a field trip >> Please do. when you get it all outfitted. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> All right, well, unfortunately, we have to leave it there. They're going to pull everybody into the keynotes, but thanks taking a few minutes. >> I'm looking forward to it. Thank you very much. >> All right, he's Alex, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from ACGSV, Mountain View, California. Thanks for watching. (techy music)

>> (Narrator) From the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE. Covering ACG Silicon Valley GROW! Awards. Brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the ACGSV 14th Annual GROW! Awards About 300 people. It's their annual event to give out a couple innovation awards. We're excited to be here, it's our 3rd year. And we're happy to have a board member on. He's Andy Armstrong, a partner at SingerLewark. Andy, great to see you. >> Hey, excited to be here. >> (Jeff) So you said you've been on the board for about a year. >> Yes. >> Why on the board? What is this organization about? Why are you excited to be part of it? >> So actually, this last year's been incredible for me with my affiliation with the group. So the board, I was able to join so I could co-sponsor and lead the young accelerator program with Jim Chapman. And what we do is, we take young start-up companies and work with them. We create a panel of experts that is about 5-6 experts and we sit down for two hour increments with these companies and really try to work out some of the issues that they might be beating their head against the wall. And we kind of help them try to jump over those hurdles that they're facing and take them to the next level. >> How old are they generally when they're in this process? In terms of number of employees or age or, how do you bucket it? >> Pretty young start up companies. I would say some are pre-revenue. Others, they might have 5 to 10 employees and they maybe have anywhere from pre-revenue to a million dollars worth of revenue, just kind of moving up the ladder so to speak. >> Right, and they don't have to be a client of your guys to participate. >> Absolutely not, no. Really we're looking for kind of open-minded executives that are really wanting to take advantage and tap in to some of the phenomenal executives that are part of ACG, as well as here in Silicon Valley. >> Right, and then you said your firm is also very involved in southern California. So there's a number of chapters of ACG. >> Absolutely. There's chapters of ACG throughout the country. The president of ACGLA for example is one of my partners down in my firm in LA. My marketing director runs one of the largest ACG conferences in the country, which is down in LA every September, so. >> Yeah, we're heavily involved as a firm in ACG. >> So we're pretty tech focused up here. Obviously, were in the Computer History Museum and I'm curious in southern California, what are some of the industries that you guys really help and leverage? >> You know, we work a lot with down there a lot of public companies. We do a lot of public company audits. We also work with what we call our family and entrepreneurially owned companies. So we like to say that's the life blood of SingerLewark, in terms of working with companies, again big or small, mom and pop, but that's really what the focus is down there. >> Right. So, biggest surprise in working with some of these entrepreneurs. It's always fun to work with people that are getting started, they're so enthusiastic. What are some of the kind of surprises as you've worked through some of those sessions with them? >> You know, maybe not surprises, but just the realization of, they're young. They're hitting their head against the wall just like you and I do sometimes. >> Right. >> And I think it's fun to get in to that environment in the accelerator because it's what I like to call a safe environment for them. It's not like they're coming in to pitch for an investment. They're coming in and kind of airing some dirty laundry and just kind of opening up and being honest with us. And that's where they get the most out of that program. >> Right and I would imagine they get quite a bit also from their peers in that environment as well. >> Um >> (Jeff) Maybe not. (laughter) >> Yeah, well in terms of the peers on our panel, absolutely. I don't know in terms of the peers, in terms of how much they're networking with their competitors so to speak. >> (Jeff) Right, right. >> It's phenomenal the experience that each one of these companies has. >> Competitions a big part of what drives us up here, for sure, so. You know, can be a partner in one area, you can be a competitor in the other, and you know, there's so many places and so much opportunity in a lot of the growth areas as well. So there's a lot of room to run. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's great. >> Well, Andy, I'll give you the last word. What are you looking forward to tonight? >> You know, it's fun just to get into a room full of top executives, very successful people here in the Bay Area. To get to kind of rub shoulders and meet and talk to them and just appreciate the success that ACG has had in working with these kind of people. >> Yeah, they bring in good ones for sure. Pat Gelsinger, will be keynoting tonight. He's been on theCUBE many times, really doing great things at VMware. So it should be a good evening. >> (Andy) It's really exciting. >> Alright, well, he's Andy Armstrong and I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from the 14th Annual ACGSV Awards. Thanks for watching. (tech music)

>>Hi. Welcome to the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin on the ground at the Computer History Museum with the Association for Corporate Go Silicon Valley. Tonight is their 13th annual grow worth, and we're very excited to be with one of their pick sponsors. Deloitte Christie. Simon's from Deloitte. Welcome. Thank you. Great to have you here. So you are a veteran and technology. You've been in the tech industry over 25 years. You've probably seen incredible transformation. Tell us about what you're doing with Deloitte and the advisory service is not you. Offer way. Offer a number of service is advisory audit tax too in Silicon Valley to a lot of these emerging growth companies. So it's been very exciting >>in my >>career to see the evolution of what I call old technology right where we kind of got the traditional software semiconductor box companies to what is now digitally what I call a new technology and what is propelling the economy in the throat that we're seeing. Not only in Bali. Exactly. So right now you are working, leading hurt and development of Deloitte's technology practice up in San Francisco. You're working with clients and you mentioned digital and clown Internet media sectors tell us about that, especially as you mentioned new technology. So a lot of them are startup companies, which is really sweet spotted, A C G. And that's why we're so involved with a G. But a lot of these new technology companies that you mentioned, you know, cloud software service, Internet media, data security, those types of companies, eyes really propelling the digital economy. So we see a lot of growth in that sector, primarily in San Francisco but also in the broader Bay Area. Silicon being checked better and as you are you mentioned out of what's going on domestically but also internationally. How do you see the influence of Silicon Valley here in Silicon Valley as well as across the globe? You know, there's a lot of factors weigh serve companies all over the globe. So primarily, Silicon Valley is propelling a lot of those. And to the extent that companies here are international, most of a lot of multinational companies and do sell their products lovely there, developed here with products are actually sold. Are you seeing kind of the inverse where companies may be headquartered in in Europe or Asia? are influencing and bringing technology over to the Silicon Valley. Next thing, let us here. Yeah, some of that, especially as we think about, uh, engineers and the aspects and some of that development that happens there, obviously sourcing that from around interest of an industry perspective in 2017. It's like every company's tech way. Look at tests around the street. Look at Walmart Labs and what they're doing there. How are you seeing some of the clients you advise for? What are some of the industries that you're seeing are now technology? There's definitely a convergence says you mentioned Too many industries, actually, all industries. So when we think about financial service is no fintech. When you think about life sciences, health, when you think about retail, right, you got Internet. So definitely saying convergence and technology is impacting our daily lives and almost everything that we d'oh and in almost every product and service that we buy, there's some form or elements of technology. Exactly. It's really remarkable. Speaking of remarkable, tonight we're here with a C G to recognize two Fantastic Cos Twilio is the emerging growth winner, 2017 and video the Outstanding Growth Award winner. If you look at and video, for example, inventor of the GPS, which is really catalyzed a tremendous amount of technology across industries. If we were just talking about you, look at their market kind of what you see them over the next couple of years. The market drivers you think they're gonna impact mentioned and video write graphic way historically have been known for games and films and virtual reality kind of thing. Now they're actually moving more into artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence? A. I knew Buzz Word, right? So there's probably a lot of opportunities for a video that technology evolves and develops over the next. Several questions for Twilio. Who's winning the emerging world? What would you do for them? So they're, you know, cloud platform company for software developers. So you think that part of the new technology is and a cloud, so providing an opportunity for engineers to develop software and software is involved in almost everything that we do as well in our daily lives. So you know that convergence of all the industries that's happening, a lot of that is a result of software and the developers who are creating that software Twilio is providing a platform for that communicated a tremendous opportunity. Companies in this new technology. Christy, thank you so much for joining us on the Cuban. Sharing your insight. Have a great evening tonight. Yes, it's, uh, it's a great turn out Isn't a lot of fun. It is. I want to thank you for watching way around the museum with a c D E f G. I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks.

>> Woman: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Okay welcome back already Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios here. Can't believe we just turned the calendar on September the 1st of 2020. What a year, it's cruising by. And one of the big topics obviously is working from home, we're seeing more and more companies telling everybody to expect to work from home through the end of the year or into next year, some are even saying indefinitely. And we've got an expert coming on the show that we're excited to have back. It's Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski. She is the founder and CEO and author of "Virtual Distance and the Virtual Distance Company". Karen, great to see you. >> Great to see you too Jeff, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so I wanted to get you back on for a couple reasons. One is we first met at the ACGSV, Association for Corporate Growth Silicon Valley 2018 Awards, about two years ago was summer of 2018. And at that point, you introduced me to the concept and our audience, to the concept of virtual distance, which if I can summarize is basically communicating through devices versus face-to-face, like we're doing here. And the bad things that come from that and challenges and this and the other. Who knew that two years from then we would all be forced and not asked, but forced to basically go to a work-from-home environment and increase the frequency and use of using electronic devices to communicate not only for work, but also for social stuff, for school, for everything, so, oh my goodness, you happen to be in the right place at the right time for not necessarily the greatest of reasons, but wow, I mean, how amazing this transformation that we've all been forced to since the middle of March. First off, get your thoughts on that and then we'll dive into what people should be thinking about, what people should be doing about it and how they can, I want to say make the most, but it does kind of make the most of, not necessarily the greatest situation. >> Yeah, well, I could have never imagined when we were sitting out at that round table outside the room where we had dinner that we'd be here two years later, right, talking about virtual distances, you said in the context of everyone having to be isolated from each other and working from home. Obviously, like everyone on the planet, I think I would never have wanted to see this happen. But I feel fortunate in a way to have put this out there many years ago because today it's serving a lot of different organizations, corporations, schools, even government organizations to have a very steady framework that's based on 15 years of data, to understand how to make the best, as you said, of this situation and to reduce some of the negative consequences of virtual distance and actually use the framework as a way to get to know people better and really see them more as human beings in a way that helps them through not just their work life, but also through the family challenges that they're having with every kid now, sort of going back to school, many of them online, there's a lot of virtual distance that can crop up even in the house. But I guess I just, I'm glad that I discovered virtual distance, and that it's useful in this time. >> Right, right. So let's jump into it. And actually I want to skip to the end of the book before we get into the beginning of the book because you talked about leadership and when this thing first hit, we had a number of leaders from the community, talking about leading through trying times. And most great leaders know that their primary job is really communication, right? Communication to their teams, communication to their constituents, communication to their customers. COVID has really changed the communication challenges and increase them dramatically and most of the stuff we're hearing is that leaders need to communicate more frequently and in more variety, both in terms of topics as well as communication forms. How does that kind of jive with your studies on virtual distance and leadership, given the fact that there aren't a lot of other options in terms of face-to-face or a little bit more intimate things? They have to use these electronic means. So what tips do you have for leaders, as they suddenly were told everybody's working from home starting like tomorrow? >> Yeah, well, it's funny that you asked me that because we learned early on when I started looking at this phenomenon in the early 2000s. We learned early on that it actually takes a lot more work and time to lead virtually than it does in more traditional environments. And the reason is because a leader really has to bring forward a lot of context that tends to go underground or become invisible about other people when we're working virtually. So the leader already was under a lot of pressure if you will, to communicate much more than they had been in more traditional settings because a lot of the information and knowledge and intelligence if you will, about the company was available in the context of the environment and other people. So leaders were already on track to having to communicate much more in order to make make remote work and virtual work work. Well, which of course it can. >> Right. >> But what happened was, we found that when suddenly a light switch is turned off, leaders needed to communicate even more. And that is kind of standard crisis management leadership. We talked a little bit about that in the past, right? So we can look at the situation we're in as not just an acute crisis that came to bear in early January and then sort of everything locking down in March. But we can kind of look at this as a long-term leadership crisis management strategy on top of just over communicating to do better in virtual space. And in a crisis management situation you definitely want to have even more communication, but it's also an opportunity actually to develop other leaders behind you on teams that can also communicate as well, to share that responsibility, to share that leadership commitment to a lot of communication during times like this, that actually works really well. >> Right, 'cause one of the things you talked about that's super, super important, more important actually than physical distance or the virtual distance is what you called the affinity distance, and I think it ties back to another point in the book in terms of clarity of communication from the leadership. What are the goals, what is the vision? And reinforcing that at a rate and frequency much higher than they've ever done before to build that affinity so people can continue to feel like they're part of something beyond more just the tasks and the roles and the assignments that I have to do every day. >> Yeah, that's exactly right, Jeff. So again, we found early on. And it was a surprise to us at first, but then became kind of obvious that people tend to think that the real challenge with virtual work is physical distance, right, sort of the space between us in terms of a geography or a geographic separation. And what we learned early on through the statistics, as well as sort of common sense was that actually physical distance had the least impact on corporate outcomes than any of the other three factors. So the affinity distance piece is really all about, how do I gain an affinity for someone when I really don't know that much about them. And I don't know much about their context in the moment that we're talking, and I also just know less about them in general when we're virtual. >> Right. >> So affinity distance is much more important than the physical separation because it's what holds us together and allows us to build very, very deep relationships which we can count on and trust no matter what the situation is. And yeah, doing that in these times is very important. >> So it's funny, right? 'Cause so much of the problems that we have with communications are in the subtle feedback mechanisms that aren't necessarily in the overt communication and as you said, those can be lost in a lot of channels. What's kind of (chuckles) interesting that's going on with COVID is we're actually seeing a side of people that we never did see in the physical space, right. Now we're literally being invited into everyone's home. I mean, I'm in your home office, I can see your books on your bookshelf and people are bringing people into their home which they may not have done before or been comfortable. Not only that, but the spouse is there, he or she is working from home. The kids are there, they're doing their school from home, the occasional dog or pet or other thing kind of jumping through the screen. So it's this weird kind of juxtaposition. On one hand you've lost a whole lot of kind of subtle communication reinforcers. On the other hand, you're getting kind of a whole new kind of the human side aspect in terms of who these people are and what they're all about, that you never necessarily had before. So I think the blending of the whole self is probably been elevated, even though the communication challenges without having kind of all these subtle feedback loops that we really rely on, are gone. So when you think about communication and communication methods based on communication messages and what you're trying to do, how do you tell people to think about that? What types of communications should be done in which ways to make them the most effective and avoid some of the real problems that come from the wrong type of communication on the wrong type of channel? >> Yeah, so first of all, you make some great points. Because it really is when we invite people into our home via these kind of video links, people see a different side of us, a contextualized side to us that they normally wouldn't see. And that opens the door, as you said, to having other communications. I think before I get directly to your question, one thing that strikes me about what you say is that this is truly a shared experience, right? So all of us are being impacted by COVID-19, the economics of the situation, the childcare issues that are raised by the situation, the community issues that we all have in our towns or cities. And we're sharing that experience, which is a great jumping off point in terms of communications because we actually have a very similar context from which were working. In terms of which communications to use when. This is a really important question, I had a person from a very, very large tech company that people use every day to go look for things on the Internet, call me and tell me at one point early, sort of early on in the pandemic that some of his people were starting to beg him to turn off the video screens. (chuckles) And just use audio because sometimes when we're overwhelmed with a crisis the video can be helpful, but it can also sort of be overwhelming. So it's important to understand sort of when to discern, when to use audio and when to use visual, when to use email and when to use tax. And the basic tips here is that email has really never been good to explain ourselves to other people. It's been great to set up lunch dates or an appointment and things like that. So email should be used pretty sparingly. Audio is really great if we don't have video, but we also just kind of need a rest from video. And we also need to really focus on a person's voice very, very intensely. So if we're trying to solve a really critical problem that's a little bit conceptual, sometimes audio can can be more helpful. Video is obviously great because it gives us all this context and it allows people to see into our home and hear our cats kind of screaming at each other which is happening right now in my house. But it also lets us see each other's expressions and a little bit of the facial communication that we need in order to know if people are okay with what we're saying, if they're quizzical and looking like they kind of don't understand et cetera, The overarching goal of communications in a situation like this, that I talk a lot about in the book, is to mix up modes of communication as much as you can think about that, right? Because we get context as I've just explained in different ways through different modes. And so if we mix it up, if I say well, I've talked to Jeff a lot over video maybe I'll just give him a call today. Or I've been using a lot of email to talk to one of my colleagues in Norway, maybe I should really try to set up a video call that is very helpful because it gives us dimensionality to someone's personality as well as their context. >> Yeah, that's a really interesting point. I think most people are always saying turn on the video, turn on the video, we want to see everybody's face but as this thing continues to go and go and go and it's going to go for the foreseeable future, and people are going to get fatigue, right, people are getting Zoom fatigue. That's a really interesting and simple way to I think, kind of lessen the stress a little bit by telling people, let's just turn the video off. We don't necessarily need to see each other, we know what we look like. And if you feel some reason to turn it on, you can turn it on, but having that as an option, I think that's a really insightful. And the other thing I want to focus on is it's not all negative, right? I mean, there's a lot of studies about the open office plan, which didn't necessarily work so well, and we've had conversations with a lot of people that say, just because you throw everybody in a room together doesn't mean that they're necessarily going to communicate more and there aren't necessarily the water cooler chatter that you're kind of hoping for. And in fact, you have a bunch of stats in the book here about remote workers having actually a lot of success. They have less trouble with technology, they can cope best with multiple projects. There's so many less interruptions, (chuckles) assuming the rest of the family has a place to work. But you don't get kind of the work interruptions that you would in terms of actually getting projects done. So, it's not all bad. And I think there's a lot of things that we can help people think about to really take advantage or make the most of the opportunity, to take advantage is probably the wrong word. So, vary communications, frequency in communications is certainly a good one. What are other ways that people kind of build trust? 'Cause you talk a lot about trust and feeling part of something bigger and not letting the individual tasks and the little day-to-day things that we do get in the way of still feeling like you belong to something that's important, that you care about, with your teammates that you want to move forward. >> Yeah, so the it's a great question, and again I think, obviously, amongst sort of the darkness there's always sort of opportunities to see some light. And I think one of the ways that we can see light through working this way at this time is to expand our understanding of the people that we're working with, right? And we can do that in a framework, it doesn't have to be haphazard. So when we look at affinity, what we really want to do is to bring forward the way people feel about their value systems, what's important to them about work in sort of pre-COVID or BC, right before COVID, but also what's important to them about their family life or about the situation that's happening, that's interacting with and integrating with their work life. So asking those questions in ways that are not guised, but sort of directly asking them things about what they value? How they feel that they're interdependent on other people? Why other people are important to them in their work, as well as just in their day-to-day lives? Those are the kinds of opportunities for questions around things that are not work related, are not party Friday, which are also kind of fun things right? But that get more to the core of who a person is, that whole person that you were talking about. And that allows us to see so much more deeply, ironically, into that human being. And when you talk about purpose, and really wanting to feel like we're part of something bigger than ourselves, those kinds of insights that build affinity help us help other people. So, we tend to focus on task orientation and goals and deliverables and all that which is absolutely critical for business continuity, and to get through the day and focus our attention. But actually what makes people feel really good about their day as a person is often how they can help other people. And so if we draw this closer affinity, we can actually figure out ways to help other people. And that just lifts everybody up and makes the work product actually even better. >> Right, right, I've always ascribed to the theory that right, if you spend your work helping other people do their work better, easier, get roadblocks out of the way, whatever, be an enabler, then you're getting this multiplier effect because I'm doing my work and I'm helping somebody else be more efficient. And it's a very different way to kind of think about work in terms of helping everybody be more effective, more efficient, and as you said, you get this great multiplier effect, but I want to shift gears a little bit. And this sentence, just jumped out of your book. I'm actually going to read from it, that despite the fact that many leadership challenges are new, we continue to over rely on management thinking and solutions that are fundamentally designed around outdated assumptions. I mean, to me this is such a huge thing. We had Martin Mikason at the beginning of this process and his great line, and he's managed remote companies for years and multiple companies. And he said, it's so easy to fake it in the office, right? It's so easy to look busy. (Karen chuckles) Whereas when you're working from home, the only thing you have to show is your output. And that's what you're graded on, your output. And yet when this thing first hit, we saw all types of new products coming out that are basically spyware for the employees, how often are you sitting in front of your computer? How often are you on a Zoom call? How often are you, doing these things? And it's striking to me that it's such an outdated way to measure activity, versus a way to measure outcome and output and what are you trying to do? I mean, it just drives me crazy to hear those things, I just love to get your take that people still are mixed up about what they're supposed to be measuring and what the purpose of the whole task is, which is to get output done not just to be busy and sit in Zoom calls all day. >> It's so true. So there's sort of two prongs to that question. And two very important things to look at. So one is how do we measure productivity, right among knowledge workers, which has been the topic of a lot of conversation. And the other thing is, what have leadership models been built off of in the past, right? If you just take the first thing first. Productivity today, if you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, you will still see productivity defined as how many widgets can I produce in an hour. That's still today, how we measure productivity, even though (chuckles) all of our output or most of our output, right, is coming from our knowledge, our thinking, our problem solving. (clears throat) So the notion of productivity feels very heavy handed to a lot of people, because it's still rooted literally economics wise in this notion of x widgets per hour, which just doesn't fit. And that comes through the second point, which is our leadership models, right? So I talked in the book and I've been talking about this for many years, because it just jumped out at me when I started to do this research, is that if you look at most leadership models today, any one of them, pick whatever one you like, transformational leadership, transactional leadership, situational leadership or whatever it might be. Those leadership models were built mainly in the 1950s. And some of them came later in the 80s. We have a few new ones, (clears throat) excuse me that have come after the internet, but not too many. And fundamentally, if you look at the communication mode of leaders in the 50s, and the 80s, it was face-to-face or phone. I mean, just by definition, was in person or via phone. But that assumption doesn't hold true anymore and hasn't held true for a good 15 years. And yet, in every business school today, we still use those leadership models as sort of our first run at how to lead. It's not that they're not useful and helpful and don't have extremely good words of advice for leaders. But the main thing leaders do is communicate. So if the fundamental channel over which leaders are communicating has completely changed, it seems natural that we should be looking for new leadership models (chuckles) that fit our times a little bit better. Taking pieces of the best of those leadership models, but really turning them on their head and saying, what's really a better approach when fundamentally our communication mode itself, it has completely changed. >> Right right. >> And that's what we do as leaders. >> And I do just want to say a word. We're talking about working from home and knowledge workers and unfortunately, there's a whole lot of people going through COVID right now that don't have that option, right. If you're in the travel industry, if you're in the hospitality industry, if you're in a lot of services industries, if you are a plumber, you can't go virtual as a plumber, unfortunately. So just to acknowledge that, what we're talking about applies to a lot of people, but certainly not everyone and everyone doesn't have these options. So I just wanted to mention that but before we wrap, Karen, the thing that struck me, as you're talking about kind of the 50s and the organizational structure, was it was really command and control and just top down hierarchies that dictated what people did. And then you as you said, your job was to put so many widgets on the widget receiver per hour, and that's what you were graded on. Where in knowledge workers, it's a very different thing. And in fact, you shouldn't tell people how to do things, you should tell people what the objectives are, and then see what they come up with. And hopefully, they'll come up with lots of different ways to achieve the objective, most of which that management has never thought of, they're not down in the weeds, and you get all kinds of interesting and diversity of opinion and different approaches. And kind of a DevOps mentality where you try lots of things and you'll find new ways to get it done. So I want to close out on this final kind of communication piece for leadership. And this is the why. I think back in the 50s, I don't know that the why we was that important. Or maybe it was and I'm not giving it enough credit. But today the why is so important. That is such a big piece of why do I come to work every day? And why am I important to work with my colleagues and move this mission forward. And so whenever you can just share, how important the why is today, and then how important the why is in trying to build a culture and hold people together when they are now by rule distributed all over the place. Talk a little bit about the why. >> Yeah, I love that question, Jeff. Because in the book, I talk a lot about Taylorism. And Taylor was the founder of like bureaucratic management and leadership and he actually despised the worker. (chuckles) There's actually a little piece in the book where he's testifying to Congress and saying that the man who handles pig iron, a type of steel, wasn't intelligent enough to understand what pig iron really was, he got a lot of flak for that. (chuckles) So as we've evolved, right, and as we've grown as organizations into knowledge workers, and I think your point about not everyone is a quote unquote, knowledge worker, is really, really important. The bottom line is, we're trying to measure our output and the value of our work by these older standards. And so people are struggling a little bit with that sort of disconnect, and looking for why, what purpose do they have? What is their bigger purpose? How are they connected to the organization in new ways? And there's actually an excellent analogy in the Navy. Is has its traditions in the Navy, called Commander's Intent which I talk about. So if you think of ships that used to sail, right out to sea, and they had lots of goals about either taking over a certain country or whatever it was they were doing, they couldn't be together, right. So we've been working remotely for a very long time. So the commander would gather all of his lieutenants, and basically tell them what his or, there were no hers at that time, but what his intentions were. And the lieutenants, the captains of the other ships, would go out to each ship, and they wouldn't follow a blueprint tactical plan they would just have the Commander's Intent as their guide. And then they were free actually, to use whatever strategies and tactics that they thought of and that worked in their context in order to fulfill the Commander's Intent, but they weren't given a blueprint. Their goal was really to use their own smarts, their own critical thinking in order to carry forward that intent. And I think that idea is very powerful today because I think if leaders can focus on helping their workers, their employees, their ecosystem partners, supply chain partners, whatever it may be, understand what the intent of the company is, and show that they trust the employees or the partner to deliver on that intent, with whatever means and creativity and imagination, guided by the intent, can be used and selected from on their day-to-day lives, people will feel so much more empowered and still get to the same outcome or actually better, than if they're told do A, B, C and D. So this idea of leader intent, I think would serve companies really well during this time, and if I could just add one other quick thing. There's another idea that comes out of sort of the military that I used and doing some work with leadership crisis management after 9-11. Around this notion of net-centricity. Net-centricity is sort of allowing people on the ground to sort of form their own networks and push information up to leadership so that they can make certain decisions and then push those decisions down with an intention back to the ground, so that this network can operate with some freedom and flexibility. And I think corporations can put net-centricity actually into place in a structured way and they'll find themselves with a lot more flexibility, higher levels of business continuity and effectiveness, and perhaps, most importantly, giving a sense of more meaningfulness and purpose and powerfulness, or self actualization back to the worker. >> Right, right, as you're speaking the word I just can't get out of my head is trust, right? It's so much about trust. And then giving people the power, enabling people the power that you trust to go do the jobs that you've hired them to do. And then to the other point that we talked about, then as a leader, help them remove roadblocks. Give them the tools, do the things that you can do to help them do their job better, versus to your point, being super prescriptive on the road actions that you wish that they would do, and then managing to the completion of the road, actions versus the accomplishment of the bigger task. It seems so simple, it's so hard for so many people to grok. It just, it still just amazes me that so many folks are unfortunately still stuck in that old paradigm. But you can't anymore 'cause everybody's (chuckles) working from home, so you better get with the program. >> (clears throat) Yeah, I'm sorry, I have a little frog in my throat. But you can. And just to add to what you're saying. I think the best thing that leaders can do is also expand their understanding of the worker as no longer just coming to work in some kind of bubble. They're coming to work with all kinds of personal situations. And I've had clients who have sort of tried to get away from that and keep the worker in a bubble. And I think, to be successful as we get through this sort of long-term leadership crisis, I think it's important to lean in to the chaos. Lean into the complexities that COVID, the pandemic, the economic situation bring and see the corporation and their role as leaders as trying to help that whole person with the complexities of their life, as opposed to trying to divorce them from their life, because that has not worked. And what works best, and I've seen this over and over again, is that companies that lean into the crisis, embrace it, and really try to help that whole employee who's coming to work in their house, really, really works very well. >> Yeah, it's going to be interesting as we come out of the summer and go back into the fall, which is the traditional season of kids going back to school and everybody kind of going back to work, and in our world conferences, and it's kind of the ramp up of a busy activity until we get kind of to the Christmas season again coming off of summer, now knowing that isn't a temporary situation, this isn't going away anytime soon. I mean, we used to talk about the new normal in March or April and May. Well now talking about the new normal in September, October, November and into 2021 is a whole different deal. So to your point, I think that's a great tip, lean in, do the best you can, learn from the experts. You don't need to do it by yourself. There's lots of documentation out there. Darren Murph has stuff up from GitHub. Or excuse me GitLab. There's lot of good information. So you do have to kind of buy into it and embrace it, 'cause it's not it's not going away. So these are great tips Karen and I give you this, the last word before we sign off. Of all the work you've done, all the clients you've worked with, a couple of two or three really good nuggets that are really simple things that everybody should be thinking about and doing today. >> I think, there's the Waldorf Schools out by you on the west coast, right, have a motto that they use for education. And it it says in through the heart out through the mind. And I think more than ever, leadership and business can borrow that idea. I think we have to sort of look at things in through the heart. And then, distribute our directions and our leadership out through the mind. At the end of the day (chuckles) we're all human beings that are all struggling in this shared experience, something that has literally never happened on planet earth with 8 billion people, connected through technology with a global pandemic. And so if we kind of can make a shift and think about taking things in through the heart and then delivering out through the mind. I think that a lot of people will feel that compassion. And that will translate into the kind of trust that we're trying to build between all of us to get through it together. And I think when we do that, I have a lot of confidence in the human spirit that we will get through it. People will be able to look back and say, yes, this was very difficult and horrific on many levels, but at the end of the day, maybe there's a little bit of a renaissance in how we sort of look at each other and treat each other with compassion and some love and joy, even in the worst of times. I think that translates over any communication medium (chuckles) including the one we're using today. >> Well, Karen, thank you for the time and thank you for closing this with a little bit of light. Congrats again on the book, "The Power of Virtual Distance", I'm sure it's available everywhere. And again, great to see you. >> Thank you so much Jeff, you too. >> All right. >> Take care. >> She's Karen, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soothing music)