>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE SiliconeANGLE Media's independent live broadcast of Nutanix .NEXT here in Nice, France. Happy to have join with me a first-time guest, John McAdam, who is the former CEO of F5 and an independent board member for a number of companies including F5, Tableau, and Nutanix. The show that we're at. So John, thanks so much for joining us. No, thank you, thanks for having me. All right, so let's start, just for people who aren't familiar, I said, you know, you were CEO of F5 for quite a few years, just give us a little bit about your background in business and what brings you here. I graduated from Glasgow University, you probably can tell from the accent, I'm Scottish. >> Stu: Yes. I moved over to the States when I joined a company called Sequent in 1994, and I became president of Sequent in 1995, and I've actually been in the States since then, up until I retired in April this year. So I spent 11 years at Sequent, president and chief operating officer, big server company is what we did at the time. Mainly selling Oracle type databases running on the servers. We were purchased, we were acquired by IBM in '99. I stayed with IBM for a year. I was running the AIX business globally for IBM, and then I was headhunted by F5 Networks, and I joined them in 2000, just as the .com bust was about to happen, and we'll talk about that later maybe. And I was the CEO at F5 for 17 years, and during the last few years I joined the board of Tableau, as you mentioned, and a company called Apptio as well based in Seattle, and of course Nutanix. Yeah, so a lot of our audience are everything from CIOs to people that someday might want to be a CIO, but very much kind of a blend of business and technology, can you tell people, some people are like, I don't understand how somebody becomes an independent board member. You're not the former CEO of that company or you're not one of the people... What does it mean to be an independent board member? You know, it's an interesting story because the independent board members at F5 actually kept encouraging me to join the board, and I kept saying, no I don't need to do that, I'm really busy, focused on the company. And also I've been a board member since 1995 as an executive, as a board member of Sequent and a board member of F5, so why would I want to join a board. And then eventually, I actually got approached, first of all by Tableau, the CEO of Tableau at the time, and seemed a very interesting conversation. So I decided to join the board. It was pre-IPO. And I thought I could add some value there, in terms of growing the company, etc. So I went along to the first board meeting and I went to the second, and I came back to the F5 board and I said, I apologize. I should have done this earlier. I didn't appreciate how much I would realize and learn being at the other side of the table as an independent board member. Because remember, you're turning up once every three months or two months. You don't know the day-to-day what's going on, but you have a very different perspective. And I wish I had done it earlier, but really it's all about trying to give consultancy, support, advice, obviously there's governance things you do as well. And I've really enjoyed being on the boards and especially Nutanix. Okay, your career, you know we've had, I think since about the time you joined F5, there was the .com crash, there was the downturn in '07/'08, so you've seen some boom times, you've seen some down times. What do you take away for those and how do you help advise the companies that you're working with? You're absolutely right. It's been an interesting experience. When I joined, as I mentioned earlier, it was a .com about to crash happening, and the big issue for F5 was it was actually 90% .com business, so the revenue collapsed completely, the stock price dropped, from today's price, from $21 to $1.50. We've run out of cash in certain areas. We ended up selling off 10% of the company to actually Nokia, they took ownership. So it was very much a survival phase. And in that phase you really have to, you need to make quick decisions. There's no time for the coaching that you would normally do. It's not as inspirational. But once you're out of it, once you get the P and L, you know, the profit and loss, and the balance sheet in good shape. Then we moved into, I would call, the stability phase, and the deal there was that we really were building a new architecture of product. We knew it was going to take a couple years. So that's all about making sure that you're in a good environment, you're going to deliver the goods from a market perspective, and we did that. I remember this well, in September 2004, we announced a new version, a new architecture, boom, we jumped into the growth (mumbles). Fifty percent growth, not quite as much as Nutanix today, but 50, 55, 40%. That's different, that's an inspirational world, you know, where you're really trying to inspire the company, it's all about hiring, and it's fun. How much do companies, when you advise them, worry about kind of what's happening to them versus what's happening locally and globally from an economics standpoint? I talked to Dheeraj many times kind of leading up to the IPO, and it was like, well, we have no control over kind of the global economical pieces, so we're building for the long term, and we will just eventually have to be like, okay, we'll go out in the public market. You know, you can't, just like buying and selling stocks, you can't necessarily time it. So, how does that impact, you know, kind of balance some of those things? I mean the best example is 2008, 2009, where we had the financial crisis, and, as I mentioned, we were very much in growth phase in 2004, '05, '06, '07. Interesting enough, as we were moving into 2008, the timing wasn't great because we were doing a product transition, and then along came the financial crisis, and it was pretty mind boggling, And the end of 2008, December 2008, customers stopped buying. And at first we thought oh my God, is this just us? And then of course, pretty soon moving into January 2009 you realize it's not you. So we didn't ignore it, to be honest, we didn't ignore it. But what we did do was we kept hiring. We cut back a little bit on the hiring, and in fact, I wish we hadn't have done that. I wish we would have completely ignored it, and of course this is me now looking back, so I can say that. The reason I'm saying I wish we had ignored it and kept growing was six months after, moving into the second half of 2009, not only did we see our business starting to grow again, but it accelerated because a demand had built up during that time. So bottom line is I don't think you can ignore global issues going on. You certainly can't ignore big global issues like 2008, but you still have to focus on what you know as your business, especially if you know you've got a good market, you know there's a demand, and just see yourself through it. Yeah, you mentioned one of the companies you joined was pre-IPO from an advisor standpoint. Have you been a Nutanix advisor just before the IPO (mumbles)? I have, I've actually had the unique experience of being on Tableau pre-IPO, Nutanix pre-IPO, and also Apptio, all pre-IPO. So I've watched the three of them going through the IPO process. So of course, Dheeraj tries to say, look, you know, I'm not going to let Wall Street kind of dictate anything, but, you know, it has to be a little bit different when you've got kind of the financial people looking at things from the outside, always trying to second guess strategy and the like. How do you give advice through that? Yeah, my advice on this, and it is somewhat different, to say it's not different wouldn't be completely correct, however, you can't let Wall Street run your business, you can't, especially if you've got conviction in terms of what you're doing. The one area where you do need to be a bit careful is that, the thing I've always said when I was CEO of F5 was our business was all about, when I was asked, do you think you could be acquired? The answer has always been from me the following: We're focused on the business, we're focused on growing a company. When you do that you become more strategic and attractive to other companies. But as long as you keep growing, your market cap keeps high, and you keep going. Right. If your market cap drops as well as the stock price there is always a danger that you could become an acquisition target. So you can't ignore it completely. But frankly, both of those messages are win-wins for investors. Absolutely, what can you say about Nutanix? You know, a year after an IPO, 2800 employees, pushing globally, you know, this show's doubled in attendance from last year. Without getting into closed-doors things, what's your take on (mumbles). Yeah, and as an independent director, I have to be more generic, but clearly, fast-growing company in a great market, a leader in the hyperconvergent market. I love their concept of simplicity, invisible infrastructure. I think that's a place that customers want to be right now, so I think they're in really good position. What in the market is interesting you these days? I look across kind of the companies you work with, you know, data is becoming more and more valuable. I spent many years working for a large storage company, used to be it wasn't really about the data, it was about the storing, and now, data from the big data companies, everything else, it's about how do I leverage and get information out, you know, we're hearing Nutanix play into that message. Yeah, and really it's the three main areas, data, you know data in particular, the Cloud, I'm not going to give you anything new here, and security. They're the three hot topics today. And the three of those are twisted in a knot are they not? They're all linked together. We just interviewed a gentleman from a bank, and he said basically, all of our budget gets put on security these days. Yeah, I mean, what concerns you, is it kind of the geopolitical, the hackers and ransomware, security? I think back early in my career, security always got lip service as being important, but today, it absolutely comes to the front of mind and you know most companies I talk to are concern would probably be understating it as to kind of the state of security. No absolutely, I mean, it's touching everybody now, boards, independent board members, it's high up on the list of discussion topics at board meetings. You know, every company is vulnerable, and if you're a technology company that's got customer data and you're in the security business as well, you really have to make sure that you're well protected. How often is security a board-level discussion these days? Most board members, most board discussions, and certainly in the audit committee, it's almost every one now. What has to happen there? Making sure that it's being looked at properly by the executives, that they take it seriously, there's enough investment, making sure that all the tools are in place if there is an attack, all of the above. Do you touch on GDPR at all? I'm curious if that comes up in your conversations. No I haven't been involved in that. I know there's a breakout session on it today, but I've not been involved in that. It just reminds me of a similar thing is that people have said, you need to make sure you're doing your due diligence and doing as much as you can, which feels like the same for security, because nobody's going to say, yes, I'm 100% secure because there's no such thing anymore. There's no such thing and there's so many different attacks, and frankly, most companies have got security solutions from so many different vendors, even sometimes from your competitor. All right, so the last thing I have to say is I don't think we've ever done theCUBE in Scotland, and it's a beautiful country, so we've got to figure out how to do some small event there. I'll help you. (laugh) All right, John, I want to give you the final word, your take, you come, why do you attend? Obviously you're an independent board, you probably have some meetings, talk to us about a show like this, what brings you. Yeah, and this is the first one I've attended. I've actually attended one similar with Tableau and similar with Apptio as well. It's good for an independent board member to see some of the presentations, how the executives and management are talking to customers, so it's actually good to get more of a feel for the business. All right, well John McAdam, appreciate you bringing a different perspective to our programming. We always want to help give a taste of what's happening at these shows out to our audience. So thank you so much for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE.

(upbeat music) >> From Phoenix, Arizona, the CUBE, at Catalyst Conference. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We're in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. There's a lot of catalyst conference, but there's only one Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. It's their fourth year, about 400 people they're going to be back in San Francisco next year. Wanted to come down and see what's going on. And we're really excited with our next guest. Actually part of my prep, I went and watched our last interview and we knocked it out of the park, I have to say. Jennifer Tejada, former President and the CEO of Keynote. Welcome back. >> Thank you, thanks so much for having me. It's great to see you again. >> Absolutely, so just to set the record straight, 'cause there's little bits on the internet, you're no longer the CEO of Keynote. >> I am no longer the CEO of Keynote. Keynote was acquired by a company called Compuware. It was merged with a business within Compuware called Dynatrace. Following that integration last year, I stepped out of the business and have been spending my time making some investments, pursuing the growth arena in Tech, and also spending a lot of time on boards and helping other women establish themselves in the community of boards and the technology industry. >> Okay, so if they weren't ringing off the hook already, now your phones will begin to ring off the hook. >> (laughs) >> You couldn't get a better CEO than Jennifer. >> Oh, thank you. >> But let's jump in. So you've been spending your time too, helping at conferences like this. So you had a session here. >> Yeah, I'm speaking today about operations. >> That's right, coming up. >> My presentation's called "Ops Chops". It's a subject that's very dear to my heart because of the pragmatism of operations, and how underrepresented I think it is at conferences like this. You know, we've seen many inspiring speakers in the last two days, talking about their paths to success, and to leadership, and giving the women in the room a lot of great advice on how to manage everything, from your career development, to work-life balance, to conflict, to challenges, how to really navigate the tech industry. Which, you know if someone could send me the book on that, that would be great. But no-one's really talking about, I think, where the rubber meets the road, which is operations. I believe operations is the bridge between strategy and the execution of great results. And there's a lot of math in operations. In the tech industry right now, we're hearing a lot of storytelling, and narratives about great new companies, new products, and the vision for how we're going to change the world, et cetera. But at the end of the day, if you want to be successful, you have to set goals that are helpfully aspirational, but realistic, and then you've got to nail your delivery. Because if you miss a beat, you don't have a lot of time to make up for that miss. And you've got investors, you've got shareholders, you have employees that expect you to deliver. And so operations I think is a great mix between art and science. The math of really measuring your business, the rigor of measuring your progress, really understanding the underlying financial drivers in your business, and then orienting your culture, and your people around the best possible execution that gives your strategy the most potential to be successful >> Right, and ops kind of gets a bad rap all the time. Everyone's talking about strategy and strategy, and we're all about strategy. At the end of the day, strategy with no execution, it's just a nice PowerPoint slide, right? But it's not like you on this. >> Exactly, exactly. And I think, you know I've been around for a little while. I've seen the market cycles in the technology industry. And we're certainly seeing a connection now. And a lot of businesses that marked themselves and measured themselves on how much money they've raised, or how much money they've spent, are now trying to figure out how to generate cash flow, and how to survive over a longer period of time if the market does soften. So I have a lot of respect for people who know how to generate cash flow, and deliver results, and deliver revenue, and measure their business on the basis of growth. Customers that vote with their dollars, right? >> Right. >> And so, yeah, I think operations, it's the unsung hero. When it comes to business outcomes. And so we're going to spend some time today talking about what I think is the quiet achiever in leadership. >> The other thing that's kind of interesting, cause we've got all these big data shows, right? Big data, cloud, probably two of the biggest topics right now, internet of things, of course being right there. But this kind of nirvana picture that gets painted, where there's going to be all this automation, and I'm just going to throw it in a big Hadoop cluster, and voila, everything happens. >> Boom, I'll have the answer. >> It doesn't really work that way. >> Not yet. I do think that machine learning, and artificial intelligence is progressing rapidly. And I think we're moving away from the automation of process to the automation of getting to the answer. I think analytics without action, though, leaves you kind of empty-handed. >> Right >> Like, so great, I have a lot of information, I have all this big data. I need the small data. I need data in the context of problems that I'm trying to solve. Whether, I'm thinking about it from consumer perspective, or a business perspective. So I see a real convergence between analytics and applications coming. You know, I think LifeLock has a funny commercial where they talk about alerting. And you know, don't just point to the fire. Like help me put the fire out. Help me figure out how the thing caught fire. And I think that's where machine learning and artificial intelligence can be super helpful. I also think that we're a long way away from really being able to leverage the true power of all this data. If you think about digital health, for example, and all the proprietary data stacks, that are being built through your FitBit, or your iPhone. You know, the way we're sensoring our personal health and fitness. But where's all that data going? Is it really contributing to research to solve, you know, health epidemics, right? No, because those stacks are all proprietary. No one wants to share them. >> Right >> So we need to get to a universal language, or a universal technology platform, that enables the researchers of the world to get a hold of that data, and do something super meaningful with it. So I think with progress, you'll also create open-ended questions. >> Absolutely >> And I think it's all positive. But I think we still have a long way to go, to see that big data environment really deliver great results. >> Right. So let's shift gears a little bit to leadership. >> Yeah. >> Another kind of softer topic. Not a big data topic. And when we talked last time, you came from Procter & Gamble When I graduated from undergrad, one of the great training programs was the Macy training program. May Company had one. So there were kind of these established things. IBM was always famous for their kind of training. It's a process where you went into a program, and it was kind of like extended school, just in a business context. You don't see that as much any more. Those programs aren't as plentiful. And so many people with the startup bug, so you see like in Iberia, they jump right in. I think you're mentioning off-air, one of the companies you're involved with, the guy's never had another job. So how do you see that kind of playing out? Kind of the lack of these kind of formal leadership opportunities, and what's that going to look like down the road. As the people who haven't had the benefit of this kind of training, or maybe it wasn't a benefit, get into these more senior positions. >> For sure. Look, leadership development is a topic that is of real interest to me. I was so fortunate and am so grateful for the opportunity that I had at Proctor & Gamble. I spent nearly six years there. And a big chunk of my time was spent in a leadership rotation program. Where you got to participate in a number of different projects and jobs, but you had mentorship, structured training and education, around what it takes to be, not just a good manager, but an effective leader. How you build a culture. How you engender people's commitments and dedication. How you really make the best of the resources that you have. How you manage your management. Whether that's board, or that's a CEO, or that's your shareholders. How you think about those things. And really tactically, what works and what doesn't. And being surrounded by people who are experts in their field. That was a long time ago, Jeff. And I don't see as many companies in the tech industry investing in that kind of leadership. And for kids coming out of college today, they're not rolling into structured leadership training programs. And so if you fast forward 20 years, what does that mean for the boards of the future? What does that mean for the Global 1000, and how those businesses are run? The good news is there's technology, there are plenty of amazing, inspirational founders out there, that have figured out how to build businesses on their own. And there's plenty of people like me, who actually want to mentor and help to build out the skill sets of these founders and these executives. But I do think that like many other areas of training and education which have been democratized in the industry, there's an opportunity to democratize leadership development and leadership training. And so that's something I'm spending a little bit of time on now. >> Good. And one of the great points you talked about. Again, go back and look at the other interview. Just Google Jennifer Tejada the Cube. Was really about as a leader, how you worked with exchanging value with your employees, right? And to quote you, you know, they're doing things that, they're not doing things that they might rather be doing. Spending time with their family on vacation, et cetera. And how you manage that as a leader of the company, to make them happy that they're there working, and to give them a meaningful place to be. And to spend that time that they're not spending on things that they might like more. >> I think culture is so important to the success of a business. You know, there are some investors that think culture is like an afterthought. It's one of those soft topics that they really don't need to care about. But for employees today, culture is everything. If you are going to spend a disproportionate amount of your waking hours with a group of people, it better be on a mission that's meaningful to you. And you'd better be working alongside of people that you think you can learn from, that inspire you, that stretch you to do more than you thought you could do. And so for me, it's about creating a culture of innovation, of performance, of collaboration. A real orientation around goals that everybody in the organization understands. In a way that is meaningful to them, within their role in the business. And that it's fun. Like, I won't do anything if it's not fun. I don't want to work with people who aren't fun. I was really excited. Two of the women who were on my leadership team at Keynote Flew here just to join me today, and support me as I'm giving a talk. But also to go out and have a drink. Because that's what we used to do after a long day at work. >> Right, right. >> And I think you have to be able to create a fire in someone by making sure that they, that they are being stretched. That they're learning and developing in that process. That they're part of something bigger than them. And that they can look back after a week, after a month, after a year in that business with you, and realize that they made an impact. That they made a difference. But that they also gained something from it, too. And I don't think we can ever underestimate the value of recognition, right? Not just money, but are you really recognizing someone for their commitment. For their emotional commitment to the business. For the time that they're spending and for what they've delivered for you, for the business, for your shareholder, for your customers. >> Jennifer, I could go with you all day long. >> (laughs) >> I'm going to get to one more before I let you go. Cause we're out of time, unfortunately. But you're now on some boards. There's a lot of talk. It feels like kind of the last plateau. Not that we've conquered the other ones. Because the last plateau is to get more women on boards. And we hear it's a matching problem, it's not so much of a pipeline problem. From your perspective, what can you advise? How can you help either people looking for qualified women, such as yourself, to be on boards. For qualified women who want to get on boards, to find them? >> That's a great question. I am very fortunate that there are people within my network that have spent time working with me, and can identify pieces of my experience that they think could be useful within their investment portfolio or within their companies. I'm part of a board called Puppet. It's an infrastructure software company based out of Portland. Super talented founder and team. Fast growing business in a really important space, software automation. Great board. I mean, I joined that board because every single person on the board, to a fault, is an amazing, accomplished executive, in and of themselves. Whether they're an investor, or a career CFO, or a career sales leader from the big technology side of the industry. So for me, it's such a great opportunity to collaborate with those people, and also take my experience, and lend what I know, and the pattern recognition that I have from running businesses, to loop the founder into his team. But I tell you, I wish that, and I hope that, the market starts to really think about diversity at the board level from a longer-term perspective. It's not just about how you find the women now. And by the way, there aren't that many female CEOs. But those of us who have sort of ticked that box and had that experience, we are available. And there are places where it's easy to find us. The Boardlist, for instance, is one of them. The Athena Alliance. Coco, the founder of that business is here. Women in Tech. I mean, it's out there. It's not that hard to find us. The challenge, I think, is the depth, the bench strength. Like who are the next female leaders that are coming up? That have functional expertise. You may need someone who's a marketing expert. You may need someone who's a product expert. You may need somebody who functionally knows consumer software, right? And it's really being willing, as a recruiter, as a recruiting executive, as a board member on the governance and nomination committee to say to your recruiters, to say to your investors, we want women on the short list. Or we want diversity on the short list. Like gender diversity, age diversity, racial diversity. A diverse board makes better decisions, full stop. Delivers better results. And I think we have to be demanding about that effort. We have to, the recruiting industry needs to hear that over and over again. And then on the flip side, we've got to develop these women. Help them build the skills. I mean, when I talk to women who want to be on boards, I say tell everybody, you want to be on a board. Be specific about the help that you need, right? Find the people that are connected in that network. Because once you're on one board, you meet board members there, they're on other boards. It does snowball. And in fact then you have to really choose the board wisely. Because it's not a two year commitment. You're in it for the long haul. So when you make that decision to choose a board, make sure it's a business that you have a real affinity to. That these are people that you want to spend time with over several years, right? And that you're willing to see that business through thick and thin. You don't get to leave the board if things go badly. That's when they need you the most. >> Right. >> So my hope is that we become much more open minded and demanding about diversity at the board level. And equally that we invest in developing women, men, people of different ages and bringing them to the board level. You don't have to be a CEO to be an effective board member, either. If you have functional, visional, regional expertise, that is a fit to that business, then you're going to be a very effective board member. >> All right, Jennifer, we have to let you go unfortunately. Thank you so much for stopping by and sharing your insight. No longer keynote, so now we can just use all our tags. Great Cube alumni, and tech athlete. So again, thanks for stopping by. >> Awesome, thank you so much for having me. >> Absolutely. Jennifer Tejada, I'm Jeff Frick. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Thanks for watching, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> From Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE, covering the Conference Board's Sixth Annual Innovation Master Class. (fast techno music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at the Innovation Master Collab at Xerox PARC. It's put on by the Conference Board, a relatively small event, but really, a lot of high-caliber individuals giving really great presentations. And we're excited about our next guest, he kicked the whole thing off this morning, and we could go for hours. We won't go for hours, we'll go about 10 minutes. But Peter Coffee, he's the VP of Strategic Research for Salesforce. Been there a long time, but you were a media guy before that for many, many years? So Peter, great to see you. >> It's good to be with you, thanks. >> So, you talk about so many things. So many things in your opening statement, and I have a ton of notes. But let's just jump into it, I think. One of the big things is you know, the future happens faster than we expect it. And we as humans have a really hard time with exponential growth, because it's not built that way. That's the way things move. >> So how do you as a businessperson kind of deal with that reality? Because the issue is you're never going to be ready for when they come. >> Yeah, well, it's not just humans as individuals, but the institutions and processes we've built. If you look at the process of getting a college degree, it's really seriously misaligned with the timeframe of change. By the time you're a senior, half of the subject matter in your field may be new since your freshman year, and conversely four years after you've graduated, perhaps a third of what you were taught will no longer be considered to be current information. Someone at Motorola once said, "a batch process "no matter how much you accelerate it "doesn't become a continuous flow process". You have to rethink what does a continuous flow look like, and that's useful conversation to have getting back to your actual opening question. When we're talking with customers, we say what are your unvoiced assumptions about the manner in which you have succession of technology, succession of product, and so on? Can we try to see what it would look like if that were a continuous process and not a project process? Many of our partners will tell us that their most difficult conversations with their customers are about getting away from a project mentality, a succession of Big Bang changes, into a process in which transformation is a way of life and not a bold initiative that will take a big sigh of relief and congratulate yourself on having transformed. No, dude, you've gotten your running shoes tied now you can begin to run. But now the hard part begins. >> Right, and the sun comes up tomorrow and you start to run again. You talked on big shifts count on new abundance and use horsepower. >> George Gilder's phrase, "errors are punctuated "by a dramatic change from a scarcity "to an abundance" so for example, horsepower or bandwidth or intelligence. >> So now we're coming into the era of massive big data we are asymptotically approaching free compute, free storage, and free networking. So how do you get business leaders to kind of rethink in an era where they have basically infinite resources, and it always goes back, so what would you build then? Because we're heading that way even if we're not there today. >> A Jedi mind trick that I often use with them is to say, let's not talk about the next couple of quarters, I want you to imagine the next Winter Olympics. When they light the torch four years from now I want you to try to visualize the world you're pretty sure you'll be living in four years from now and work backwards from that and say well if we all agree that within four years that's going to get done, well there's some implications about things we should be doing now and some things that we should stop doing now if we know that four years from now, the world is going to look like this. It helps free your mind from the pressures of incremental improvement and meeting next quarterly goals. And instead saying, ya know, that's not going to be a thing in four years and we should stop getting better at doing something that's simply not going to be relevant in that short of a time. >> So hard though, right? Innovators still, I mean, that's the classic conundrum especially if it's something that you have paying customers and you're driving great revenue to, it's hard to face the music that that may not be so important down the path. >> The willingness to acknowledge that someone will disrupt you, so it might as well be you, you might as well disrupt yourself, the conversation was had with IBM back in the days of the IBM PC, that they thought that that might be a quarter of a million machines they would sell, but whatever you do, don't touch the bread and butter of the 3270 terminal business, right? And they did not ultimately succeed in visualizing the impact of what they had done. Ironically, because they didn't think it was that important, they opened all the technology, and so things like Microsoft becoming what it is and the fact that the bios was open and allowed the compatibles industry like Compact to emerge was a side effect of IBM failing to realize how big of a door they were opening for the world. You can start off a spinoff operation. At Salesforce we have a product line called Essentials which is specifically tasked with create versions of Salesforce that are packaged and priced and supported in a way that's suitable to that small business. And that way you can kind of uncouple from that Clayton Christensen innovators dilemma thing by acknowledging it's a separate piece of the business, it can be measured differently, rewarded differently, and it's going to convey itself maybe even through a genuinely different brand. This is an example that was used once with Disney which when it decided it wanted to get away from family and children's entertainment, and start making movies aimed at more adult audiences, fine, they created the Touchstone brand so they could do that without getting in the way of, or maybe even polluting, a brand that they spent so much time building. So branding is important. A brand is a set of promises, and if you want to make different promises to different people, have a different brand. >> Right, so I'm shifting gears 'cause you touched on so many great things. A really popular thing that's going on now is the conversion of products to services. And repackaging your product as a service. And you talked about the don't taze me bro story which has so many elements of fun and interesting but I thought the best part of it, though, was now they took it to the next step. And we're only a stones throw away from Tesla, a lot of innovation but I think one of the most kind of not reported on benefits of these connected devices and a feedback loop back to the manufacturer is how people are actually using these things, checking in from home, being able to do these updates. And you talk about how the TASER company now is doing all the services, it's not even a service, it's a process. I thought it's awesome. >> Taking a product and selling it at a subscription price does not turn it into a service, even though some people will say, well see now we're moving to a services model. If you're still delivering a product in a lumpy, change-it-every-couple-of-years way, you haven't really achieved that transformation. So you have to go back into more of a sense of I mean, look at the expectation people have of the apps on their smartphones, that they just get better all the time, that the update process is low-burden, low-complexity, low-risk, and you have to achieve that same fluidity of continuous improvement. So that's one of the differences. You can't just take the thing you sell, bill for it on a monthly subscription, and think that you achieved that transition. The thing that they folks who were once TASER and now are Axon, of which TASER is a sub-brand, they managed to elevate their view from the device in a police officer's hand to a process of which that device is a part. Which is the incident that begins, is concluded, results in a report, maybe results in a criminal prosecution, and they broadened the scope of the Axon services package to the point that now it is selling the proposition of increased peace officer productivity rather than merely the piece of hardware that's part of that. So being able to zoom out and really see the environment in which your product is used, and this relates to yet another idea which is that people are saying you got to think outside your box. It doesn't help if you get outside your box, but all of the people with whom you might want to collaborate are all still inside their boxes. And so you may actually have to invest in the transformation and interface development of partners or maybe even competitors, and isn't that a wild idea. Elon Musk at Tesla open sourced a lot of their technology with the specific goal of growing that whole ecosystem of charging stations and other things so Tesla could be a great success. And the comment that I once made is it doesn't help if you're a perfect drop of artisanal oil in a world of water. You have to make the world capable of interacting with you and supporting you if you really want to grow. Or else you're an oddity, you're Betamax, which might have been technically superior but by failing to really build the ecosystem around it, wound up losing big time to VHS for a while. I may have to explain to all of your viewers under the age of 30 what VHS and Betamax even mean. >> I was sellin' those, I could tell you the whole Panasonic factory optimization story, which is whole 'nother piece of that puzzle. So that's good, so I'm going to shift gears again. >> You have to look a big perspective, you have to be prepared to forget that your excellence is your product, and start thinking of that as just the kernel of what needs to be your real proposition which is the need you meet, the pain you address, the process of which you become an inseparable part instead of a substitutable chunk of hardware. >> Well and I think too it's embracing the ongoing relationship as part of the process, versus selling something to your distribution and off it goes you cash the check and you build another one. >> Well that's another aspect, we've got whole industries where there's been a waterfall model. Automobiles were a particular example. Where manufacturers wholesaled cars to distributors who gave them the small markup to dealers who owned the buyer customer. And dealers would be very hostile to manufacturers trying to get involved in that relationship. But now because of the connected vehicles the manufacturer may know things about the manner of use of the vehicle and about the preliminary engagement of the prospective buyer with the manufacturers website. And so improving that relationship from a futile model, or a waterfall model, into a collaborative model is really necessary if all these great digital aspects are to have any value. >> Right, right, right. And as a distribution of information that desire to get a level of knowledge is no longer the case, there's so much more. >> Well it's scary how easy it is to do it wrong. IDC just did a study about the use in retail banking of technology like apps and websites. Which that industry was congratulating itself on adopting in ways that reduce the cost of things like bank office hours. And yet J.D. Power has found that the result is that customers no longer see differentiation among banks, are less loyal, more easily seduced by $50 to open a new bank account with direct deposit. And so innovation's a vector, and if you aim it at cost reduction, you'll get one set of results. And if you aim it at customer satisfaction improvement, you'll innovate differently, and ultimately I think much more successfully. >> Right, right, so we're almost out of time here. I want to go down one more path with you which I love. You talked a lot about visualization, you brought up some old NOPs, really talked about context, right? In the right context, this particular visualization is of value. And there's a lot of conversation about visualization especially with big data. And something I've been looking for, and maybe you've got an answer is, is there a visualization of a billion data point dataset that I can actually look at the visualization and see something, and see the insight. 'Cause most of the ones we see that are examples, they're very beautiful and there's a lot of compound shapes going on, but to actually pinpoint an actionable something out of that array, often times I don't see, I wonder if you have any good examples that you've seen out there where you can actually use visualization to drive insight from a really, really big dataset. >> Well if a big data exercise produces a table of numbers, then someone's going to have to apply an awful lot of understanding to know which numbers look odd. But a billion points, to use your initial question, well what is that? That's an array that's 1,000 by 1,000 by 1,000. We look at 1,000 by 1,000 two-dimensional screens all the time, visualizing a three-dimensional 1,000 by 1,000 cube is something we could do. And if there is use of color, use of motion, superposition of one over another with highlighting of what's changed, what people need most is for their attention to be drawn to what's changing or what's out of a range. And so it's tremendously important that people who are presenting the output of a big data exercise go beyond the high-resolution snapshot, if you will, and construct at least some sense of A B. Back in the ancient days of astronomy, they had a thing called the Blink Camera which would put two pictures side-by-side and simply let you flip back-and-forth between the images, and the human eye turned out to be amazingly good. There could be thousands of stars in that picture, the one dot that's moving and represents some new object, the one dot that suddenly appears, the human brain is very good at doing that. And there's a misperception that the human eye's just a camera. The eye does a lot of pre-processing before it ever sends stuff to the brain. And understanding what human vision does, it impressed the heck out of me the first time I had a consultation on the big data program at a university where the faculty waiting to meet with me turned out to be from the schools of Computer Science, Mathematics, Business, and Visual Arts. And having people with a sense of visual understanding and human perception in the room is going to be that critical link between having data and having understanding of opportunity threat or change. And that's really where it has to go. So if you just ask yourself, how can I add an element of color, or motion, or something else that the human eye and brain have millennia of evolution to get good at detecting, do that. And you will produce something that changes behavior and doesn't just give people facts >> Right, right. Well, Peter, thank you for taking a few minutes. We could go on, and on, and on. >> Happy to do chapters two, three, and four any time you like, yeah. >> We'll do chapter two at the new tower downtown. >> Any old time, thanks so much. >> Thanks for stoppin' by. >> My pleasure. >> He's Peter, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Master Innovation Class at Xerox PARC put on by the Conference Board. Thanks for watching. (fast techno music)

>> From Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE. Covering The Conference Board's 6th Annual Innovation Master Class. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Innovation Master Class that's put on by The Conference Board. We're here at Xerox PARC, one of the original innovation centers here in Silicon Valley. Tremendous history, if you don't know the history of Xerox PARC go get a book and do some reading. And we're excited to have our next guest because there's a lot of talk about tech but really not enough talk about people and where the people play in this whole thing. And as we're seeing more and more, especially in downtown San Francisco, an assumption of responsibility by tech companies to use some of the monies that they're making to invest back in the community. And one of the big problems in San Francisco if you've been there lately is homelessness. There's people all over the streets, there's tent cities and it's a problem. And it's great to have our next guest, who's actually doing something about it, small discrete steps, that are really changing people's lives, and I'm excited to have him. He's Kevin Adler, the founder and CEO of Miracle Messages. Kevin, great to meet you. >> Great to meet you too Jeff. >> So, before we did this, doing a little background, you knew I obviously stumbled across your TED Talk and it was a really compelling story so I wonder A, for the people, what is Miracle Messages all about, and then how did it start, how did you start this journey? >> Miracle Messages, we help people experiencing homelessness reconnect to their loved ones and in the process, help us as their neighbors reconnect with them. And we're really tackling what we've come to call the relational poverty on the streets. A lot of people that we walk by every day, Sure, they don't have housing, but their level of disconnection and isolation is mind boggling when you actually find out about it. So, I started it four years ago. I had an uncle who was homeless for about 30 years. Uncle Mark, and I never saw him as a homeless man. He was just a beloved uncle, remembered every birthday, guest of honor at Thanksgiving, Christmas. >> And he was in the neighborhood, he just didn't have a home? >> He was in Santa Cruz, he suffered from schizophrenia. And, when he was on his meds he was good and then he'd do something disruptive and get kicked out of a halfway house. And we wouldn't hear from him for six months or a year. >> Right. So, after he passed away, I was with my dad, and not far from here, visiting his grave site in Santa Cruz. And I was having a conversation with my dad of the significance of having a commemorative plot for Uncle Mark. I said, he meant something to us, this is his legacy. So that's nice, but I'm going to go back in the car, pull out my smartphone, and see status updates from every friend, acquaintance I've ever met, and I'm going to learn more about their stories on Facebook, with a quick scroll, than I will at the grave site of my Uncle Mark. So, I'm actually a Christian. I have a faith background, and I asked this question: "How would Jesus use a smartphone?" "How would Jesus use a GoPro camera?" Cause I didn't think it was going to be surfing pigs on surf boards. And I started a side project where homeless volunteers, like my Uncle Mark, wore GoPro cameras around their chests. And I invited them to narrate those experiences and I was shocked by what I saw. And I won't regale you with stories right now but I heard over and over again, people say "I never realized I was homeless when I lost my housing, "only when I lost my family and friends." >> Right. >> And that led me to say, if that's true, I can just walk down the street and go up to every person I see and say "Do you have any family or friends "you'd like to reconnect with?" And I did that in Market Street, San Francisco four years ago, met a man named Jeffrey, he hadn't seen his family in 22 years. Recorded a video on the spot to his niece and nephew, go home that night, posted the video in a Facebook group connected to his hometown, and within one hour the video was shared hundreds of times, makes the local news that night. Classmates start commenting, "Hey, "I went to high school with this guy, "I work in construction, does he need a job? "I work at the mayor's office does he need healthcare?" His sister gets tagged, we talk the next day. It turns out that Jeffrey had been a missing person for 12 years. And that's when I quit my job and started doing this work full time. >> Right, phenomenal. There's so many great aspects to this story. One of the ones that you talked about in your TED Talk that I found interesting was really just the psychology of people's reaction to homeless people in the streets. And the fact that once they become homeless in our minds that we really see through them. >> Totally. >> Which I guess is a defense mechanism to some point because, when there's just so many. And you brought up that it's not the condition that they don't have a place to sleep at night, but it's really that they become disassociated with everything. >> Yeah, so I mean, you're introduction to me, if you had said hey there's this guy, there's no TED talk, there's nothing else, he's a housed person, let's hear what he has to say. Like, what would I talk... That's what we do every single day with people experiencing homelessness. We define them by their lack of one physical need. And, sure, they need it, but it presumes that's all there is to being human. Not the higher order needs of belonging, love, self-actualization. And some of the research has found that the part of the brain that activates when we see a person, compared to an inanimate object, does not respond when we see a person who's experiencing homelessness. And in one experiment in New York, they had members of a person's very own family, mom and dad, dress up to look homeless on the streets. Not a single person recognized their own member of their own family as they walked by 'em. >> Yeah, it's crazy. It's such a big problem, and there's so many kind of little steps that people are trying to do. There's people that walk around with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that we see on social media, and there's a couple guys that walk around with scissors and a comb and just give haircuts. These little tiny bits of humanization is probably the best way to describe it makes such a difference to these people. And I was amazed, your website... 80 percent of the people that get reconnected with their family, it's a positive reconnection. That is phenomenal because I would have imagined it's much less than that. >> Every time we reconnect someone, we're blown away at the lived examples of forgiveness, reconciliation. And every reunion, every message we record from a person experiencing homelessness, we have four, five messages from families reaching out to us saying, "Hey I haven't seen "my relative in 15 years, 20 years." The average time disconnect of our clients is 20 years. >> Right, wow. >> So what I've been doing now is, once you see it like this, you walk down the street, you see someone on the streets, you're like that's someone's son or daughter. That's someone's brother or sister. It's not to say that families sometimes aren't the problem. Half of the youth in San Francisco that are homeless, LGBTQ. But it's to say that everyone's someone's somebody that we shouldn't be this disconnected as people in this age of hyper-connectivity and let's have these courageous conversations to try to bring people back in to the fold. >> Right, so I'm just curious this great talk by Jeff Bezos at Amazon talking about some of the homeless situations in Seattle and he talks, there's a lot-- >> He's a wealthy guy, right? >> He's got a few bucks, yeah, just a few bucks. But he talks about there's different kind of classes of homelessness. We tend to think of them all as the same but he talks about young families that aren't necessarily the same as people that have some serious psychological problems and you talked about the youth. So, there's these sub-segments inside the homeless situations. Where do you find in what you offer you have the most success? What is the homeless sub population that you find reconnecting them with their history, their family, their loved ones, their friends has the most benefit, the most impact? >> That's a great question. Our sweet spot right now, we've done 175 reunions. >> And how many films have you put out? >> Films in terms of recording the messages? >> Yeah, to get the 175. >> 175 reunions, we have recorded just north of about 600 messages. And not all of 'em are video messages. So, we have a hotline, 1-800-MISS-YOU. Calls that number, we gather the information over the phone, we have paper for 'em. So 600 messages recorded, about 300, 350 delivered and then half of them lead to a reunion. The sweet spot, I'd say the average time disconnected of our clients is 20 years. And the average age is 50, and they tend to be individuals isolated by their homelessness. So, these are folks for decades who have had the shame, the embarrassment, might not have the highest level of digital literacy. Maybe outside of any other service provider. Not going to the shelter every night, not working with a case worker or social worker, and we say hey, we're not tryna' push anything on ya' but do you have any family or friends you'd like to reconnect with. That opens up a sense of possibility that was kind of dormant otherwise. But then we also go at the other end of the spectrum where we have folks who are maybe in an SRO, a single room occupancy, getting on their feet through a drug rehab program and now's the point that they're sayin' "Hey, I'm stably housed, I feel good, "I don't need anything from anyone. "Now's the time to rebuild that community "and that trust from loved ones." >> Kevin, it's such a great story. You're speaking here later today. >> I think so, I believe so. >> On site for good, which is good 'cause there's so much... There's a lot of negative tech press these days. So, great for you. How do people get involved if they want to contribute time, they want to contribute money, resources? Definitely get a plug in there. >> Now, or later? Right now, yeah, let 'em know. >> No time like the present. We have 1200 volunteer digital detectives. These are people who use social media for social good. Search for the loved ones online, find them, deliver the messages. So, people can join that, they can join us for a street walk or a dinner, where they go around offering miracle messages and if they're interested they can go to our website miraclemessages.org and then sign up to get involved. And we just released these T-shirts, pretty cool. Says, "Everyone is someone's somebody." I'm not a stylish man, but I wear that shirt and people are like "That's a great shirt." I'm like, wow, and this is a volunteer shirt? Okay cool, I'm in business. >> I hope you're putting one on before your thing later tonight. >> I have maybe an image of it, I should of. >> All right Kevin, again, congratulations to you and doing good work. >> Thanks brother, I appreciate it. >> I'm sure it's super fulfilling every single time you match somebody. >> It's great, yeah, check out our videos. >> All right he's Kevin, I'm Jeff. We're going to get teary if we don't get off the air soon so I'm going to let it go from here. We're at the Palo Alto Xerox PARC. Really the head, the beginning of the innovation in a lot of ways in the computer industry. The Conference Board, thanks for hosting us here at the Innovation Master Class. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (bright ambient music)