>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston. This is an episode in the remote works, Citrix virtual series. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studio here on this ongoing leadership series that we've been doing, reaching out to people in the community to get their take on what's going on with the COVID situation, what are best practices, what can we learn and specifically today, really the whole new way to work, and working from home. And we're really excited to have two guests on for this segment. The first one is Amy Hayworth. She is the Chief of Staff for HR for Citrix, joining us from Florida. Amy, great to see. >> Great to see you, Jeff. >> And also Tamara McCleary, who's been on many, many times coming to us from Denver. She is a well respected speaker, you've probably seen her doing more speaking than anything else, and also the CEO of Thulium. Tamara, great to see you. >> Thank you, I'm so excited for this conversation. >> Well, let's just jump into it. So it's so funny and doing a little homework, Amy, I came across a Professional Change Management executive conference, 2015 and you were talking about building change management as a profession and working from home was part of that and that was like five years ago and things creep along and then we have a light switch moment where there's no time to plan, there's no time to think, there's no time to implement things, it's, everyone must now stay at home. And so, outside the human tragedy, that is the COVID situation, we're not going to really speak to that here. But from a business point of view, suddenly with no warning, everyone had to work from home. From someone who's been in the profession of trying to drive change management through a process over time, what does that do for you? How do you digest that suddenly oh my goodness, we've got this light switch moment which is a forcing function that may have never come, but now we have to go? I wonder what your take is. >> I think the thing that get me most excited about this light switch moment is it is showing all of us that we are capable beyond what we ever thought we were when it comes to change. We've been called to take a leap, and for much of my experience in the organizational change management field, we spend a lot of time talking about managing resistance and the pushback about change and there's even this thing that drives me crazy, which is change is hard. I don't know why we tell ourselves that message. And I think what this is showing us is that number one, change is inevitable, it's going to happen. There is very little control that we actually have, but also we are more resilient, more adaptable. We're capable of change than many of us knew that we were. And it is calling up for me, what do we need to put in place within organizations to cultivate resilience? Because one of the things I think this is making all of us very aware is how volatile the world actually is. And it's also laid bare where we are strong individually and able to cope and where we also may need to do a little bit of practice and some very intentional resilience building. Though I think the conversation around the whole change management field is about to change and my hope is that focus turns more to resilience than it is to managing change. >> It's interesting 'cause a lot of just the chatter that's out there, is about Zoom. Do I use Zoom? Do I not use Zoom? Is it secure? All this other, people like to jump into the technology piece. But really, we had your boss on the other day, Donna Kimmel, the EVP and Chief People Officer, Citrix and she broke it down into three buckets. Culture was number one, physical space is number two and digital space was number three. And I thought it was really interesting that she really leads with empathy and human factors and I think that it's easy to forget those, but bringing up simple things that not only are you working from home, but guess what, your kids are home too and your spouse is home too. And they have meetings and they have Zoom calls, they have to do it or the other dog is still running around and all the other kinds of distractions. So the human factors are so, so important. Tamara, one of your early keynotes about your early development was in your early career working with people who are at the end of their life. And I know it helped you develop an empathy and really a prioritization that I think a lot of people are probably getting today that maybe they haven't thought about, what is truly important, what is truly meaningful. And this again, is this forcing function to say let's pump the brakes a little bit, take a step back and think about what's really important and the human factors. Again, your take on this crazy situation. >> I think you're absolutely right Jeff, and the fact that really what this has done, to Amy's point, yes we are very capable of change, but we're mostly so resistant and unwilling to change. And it's not because we don't want to, it's because we fear what will happen if we do change. And sometimes it's like the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. And right now what has been forced upon us is to really think about critical issues. So when you're faced with a lack of toilet paper and uncertainty about your survival rate, you start to think about things in terms of say Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You're looking at that base level, that safety piece. And when people go to safety, they have really left that area of self actualization in what do I want to be, what do I want to do? And it's more about, oh no, what have I done? Do I like my life? I'm stuck here at home, wherever you're sheltering in place and am I really enjoying my life? Am I experiencing my life? And what we really have experienced through being forced to get on to video conferencing, how many of you out there are doing video conferencing like a billion times a day? We're being forced to really see each other as human beings. And that means whether you're the CEO or you're the EVP of global blah, blah, it doesn't matter. What matters is your dog is still barking, your child is still running around and needs something from you in that moment when you happen to be on a call. Because as we all know, with kids, when you say, I can't be bothered for the next 30 minutes, what do you think is going to happen? That's exactly the time when they need more grapes. So I think that what it does is it levels the playing field and it shows us all how human we are. It shows us our strengths as Amy pointed out, and it also shows us our communal frailty. >> So let's get into some of the specifics about what people are feeling. Citrix just commissioned this report put on by one pole, pretty timely, comes out in April, 2020, about working from home. And I think there was really some interesting stuff, still connectivity and bandwidth, still the biggest challenge that people have. Can I even get online, was the number one problem. And when they do, their wifi is slow and there's single sign on. All these things that we've been talking about for years and years and years. I mean, why, why Amy, have we still not gotten it done? It's fascinating to me that in 2020, we still have internet connectivity issues and people don't know how to turn on their microphone on their Zoom call, we're so far behind. >> Yeah, Jeff, I think what we're seeing is number one, it takes practice, then the need to be familiar with all these tools. I also have talked to many parents who first day of homeschool, my son tells me I can't call it homeschool 'cause it's different, it's virtual school, he says it's very different. But that first day, especially families with multiple children trying to get onto a Zoom call with their class, Heron is trying to work, possibly two parents in the house are connected. Our home WiFi networks just haven't taken this kind of load before, but very quickly I think we needed to realize as an organization that this is not work from home, this is working at home during the global pandemic and it is very different. So you mentioned that need to lead with empathy and to really understand what's going on, and I think that's so true and just that the humanness of what we've experienced, that one full research really talked about a few epic moments of mishap, whether it's taking a call from the garage, I have a colleague who would take from the car on the street, still sheltering in place, but the only quiet place to go to take a call. We have a legend in our Singapore office. There's a salesperson who made record numbers working from his garage for a month. So there are all sorts of heroics taking place to balance than in the midst of that when technology isn't acting as we would hope it would under normal circumstances, having to adjust quickly, whether that means staggering schedules, working through accommodations, teachers, however it needs to happen but I think the reality and the acceptance, going back to that humanness and empathy is that we all have to shift our mindset about what work means and even are at work. We've built up a lot of these polishished buttoned up personas and when we are able to actually let some of that down, I think what we're starting to see is connection on a much deeper level amongst teams and among colleagues. >> I'm just looking at the survey at how few people think that this is going to roll over into a little bit more of a permanent form. Only 37% think my organization in general will be more relaxed about remote working. I think staff will be allowed to work from home more regularly, 36%. We had Marten Mickos on and he ran MySQL before it got bought by Sun many moons ago. He talked that he had a distributed team from day one and he laughed. He said, "It's so much easier to fake it at the office, "to look busy versus when you're remote." As you just said Amy, you're only judged by your deliverables. And I thought it was so funny in your blog posts from earlier this year that when managers start managing by outcome and deliverable rather than assuming as good work's getting done because someone showed up at the office, I mean this is ridiculous that people are still judging things based on activity, not outcome. And we're even seeing now all these new tools that people are introducing in the marketplace. I can tell you how often your people are on Zoom and how many hours on the VPN. What are we measuring? We should be measuring outcomes and the piece that comes up over and over is trust. And if I can't trust you to deliver outcomes, I probably have a bigger problem than managing your day to day. Tamara, you see this all the time in terms of the trust and how important this is to relationships. >> I do and in fact our workforce at Thulium has always been a remote workforce. And for the way that I've built our organization is treat everybody like an adult and get your work done. And we do base everything upon productivity versus FaceTime. And I think that the reason some of these larger organizations have had this concept of show up having that FaceTime means that whoever gets there the earliest and leaves the latest somehow has been a better employee, it's not true. It is about productivity. And I think those wise organizations that look at how much they can save with the costs of like AC heat, the building cost, having a brick and mortar for everyone to come into it is very costly. And it's an old paradigm that a lot of middle managers have, which is this control piece. And that if the people are there in the office, they've got more control. And actually what we find is you don't need that control, especially when you look at the younger generational cohort coming up, how they have a totally different view of work. And we've talked a lot about the future of work and the gig economy, and what this COVID pandemic has done for us is to show us that actually work does get done at home. And in fact in some respects, more work gets done at home because it's harder to stop working when your work is happening right there at home. And so it does blur the lines and the boundaries between the work life than the home life. And so I think you get a lot more out of your employees when they work from home. >> It's funny, when Donna was on, she brought up a really interesting topic. She said, "Every time somebody pushes back on that, "can't be done from home." This job, this person, this type of task can't be done from home. The question should always be like, why? It almost sounds like when you move the whole cloud conversation that we've been tracking, went from, when should I move stuff to cloud, to why shouldn't you move to cloud? And it's not, does it work on a mobile, it should be mobile first. And now this conversation is moving this to, why can't somebody do it from home, as opposed to it has to be done from the office? So I think even just the relative flip of the context of setting up the question seems to be changing. That's why it surprised me that so few people think that it's going to go back. It clearly, especially as this goes on for a while, new behaviors become habits and they become normalized and hopefully, the senior management pays attention to the outcome and again, not this activity which is really not, that's not what you want people to do, you want them to actually get stuff done. >> Jeff and Amy, the other thing I was going to say is, Amy, when you look at the report that Citrix has put out, how many people are even going to be able to go back to work when kids aren't going back to school? And then we have summer, piggybacking onto that, so now you've got parents who have kids at home, what is that outlook? To me, it's not just this simple, okay, it's over, let's get back to work guys, because the rest of our life has completely shifted as well. >> That was actually my conversation today, is starting to really think about holistically when it comes to policies, programs, what are we putting in place for the summer? And not only that, but even some of our employees who have been alone through this, I think at the beginning, there was a very large shift on those who had children or elder care to think about. And at some point, at least in this half of the world, about last week, we really started to hear, worried about this person who's been alone by themselves in their apartment sheltering for over a month. So I think if they start to look at the variety of experiences people are having, really being sensitive to different personas in the organization, different needs, different emotions that are happening and we even start to think about, what does that mean to come back to work? And I know countries and organizations are being very cognizant about doing that. safely, in a very gradual  way of thinking about it, but it starts to get very, very complex very quickly and also from just let's do this well because there's a whole new set. Jeff, you bring up all new set of questions of employees asking, I wasn't allowed to work from home prior, I would like to do that more often now, new conversations with managers about, well, how are we going to measure results? There's a lot of work to be done between now and then, whatever what then is, to really ensure that we help everyone be successful. And I think the conversation we're having, it's likely not going to be one or the other. The new normal is not the old normal and we're not sure what it is but most likely, there's going to be some sort of hybrid working arrangement. Right now, the playing field is leveled and that in and itself is a very different work from home experience. What happens when it's hybrid again and there are some who are remote, some who are in the office, how do we make sure that it's equitable and all the voices have equal opportunity to chime in? Because when people are in the office and their colleague or two is remote, it's not a level of conversation in an organization. So whether that's establishing norms or really just starting to create behaviors where if one person's remote, then everybody's remote no matter if you're in the office or not, you dial in via go to meeting or whatever collaboration tool you're , so all sorts of things to think about, but I guess that is our ecosystem of work is going to change for sure. >> It was so funny in your blog posts, you talked a little bit about that as well. And one of the little paragraphs was, who gets to do it? It's like this binary decision, you can either work from home or you can't. And there's this whole second order impacts that we see on infrastructure, there's nobody in the trains or there's nobody on the freeways. You think, wow, we actually have a lot of freeways if everyone is not on them at the same time. So, begs a lot of questions are why is everybody driving to work at 8:30 in the morning to work on their laptop? Now clearly if you're in construction or service trades and you've got a truck and you got to go do something on site, they have to be there. But I think hopefully what this will do is help people as you're discussing, look at those who can. And even if it's one day a week, two days a week, one day a week, every couple of weeks. The impact on infrastructure, the impact on traffic, the environment, mental health, Amy, you talked about mental health, sitting in a car for an hour each way, every day certainly is not helping anybody feel better about themselves or get more work done. So I think there are so many benefits if you just look at it in the right context, focused on who can, not who can't and the how and the why and the enabler. But it's really interesting, we've talked a lot about the physical space and the cultural space. Imagine if this happened in 2006, before the iPhone came out, the smartphone. Think of the crazy amount of tools that we do have. I mean right now, we're talking and we spread out all over the country. So we're actually in a really fortunate space in terms of the digital infrastructure that we have in place to enable these things. And I know Citrix, you guys have been in the lead of supporting this forever, now even have a whole set up of resources, what's it called, the Citrix Remote Work Hub for people to get resource to figure out everything from the mental health to the WiFi connectivity, to all these other little things as Tamara said, how do you manage the kids and the dog and your significant other that also has Zoom meetings that they have to attend? So it's so many resources that people need to use and not feel uncomfortable that they're alone and could use a little bit of an assist. >> Absolutely well said. When this quickly became a forced experiment to work remote, Citrix has 30 years of history helping enable successful remote work in a secure way and the first thing that we wanted to do was be of service. So pulling together these resources has been a big project and we're so glad to be able to provide this tool set and we truly do hope that it makes this transition stronger, better, it will continue to grow and to evolve even as our own experiences evolve, new challenges arise, but we definitely want to keep it fresh and keep meeting the need that's out there, both internal for Citrix as much as in as long as we've been doing, we don't have it all figured out, we are learning too, this is unchartered territory for everyone, but also to take what we are learning and put it out there in a very transparent way. >> Right, I want to-- >> You know, I was-- >> Go ahead, Tamara. >> Sorry, but there was just something so crazy, Jeff, about the study that Citrix put out. And Amy, I wanted to bring this up to you because you said they're coworkers like, well, so-and-so lives alone, I wonder if they're okay or if they're lonely. But in the study, barely a quarter of the individuals reported any loneliness. I find that to be pretty shocking. >> It is shocking and I think it really speaks to how quickly those happy hours, the Zoom Happy Hours or the gatherings and some of the creativity that started to pop up, but yeah, you made a great point, Tamara, that was surprising and I'm curious if that will continue to be the case. (murmurs) >> But I guess maybe some of us when we got home, we were like, wow, this isn't so bad after all. And then can you imagine? So Jeff, if only 28% of people experienced any loneliness, imagine when you can have peace and quiet in your home again and still work. I think that this really is a lot more delicious than a lot of us anticipated it would be. And, what a grand social science experiment this has been! It's phenomenal. >> The fact that everyone is experiencing it at the same time globally just blows my mind. I was here for the earthquake, I was in Portland for Mount Saint Helens, I've been through a few little things here and there, but those are still regional, there's still a safe space, there's still people that don't have that story. Everyone, six or 7 billion people will have a where were you in March, 2020 story, which is fascinating. And then as you said, it's not only the work from home, there's no time to plan and no time to put infrastructure and, oh by the way, the kids are home too, and school is also from home. So in terms of an accelerant, it's just gasoline on the fire. But I want to jump in a little bit about one of the things you talked about Amy and you'll take camera 'cause you're doing it in your own company, and is in terms of establishing norms. I think people are maybe not thinking about the fact that they either need to establish new norms or they need to be very clear on the communication of what the norms are so that everybody is as you said Amy, feels comfortable in this new space because we have norms at work and now we have to have these new norms and there's all kinds of funny stuff going on in terms of we talked about dogs and kids, that this and that dressed, you're not dressed, you put makeup on, it's funny in the survey, do you take a shower? Only 30 some odd people take a shower every day, which I thought was kind of-- unexpected >> What about the shoe comment? Did you believe that, Jeff, where people actually would wear their shoes to their death? Well, I'll tell you, they didn't ask the women because the women would not be wearing high heels at home if they didn't have. >> They didn't specify which shoes, Tamara, they just said shoes. So maybe the more comfortable flats were the ones that were coming out. But I'm just curious on establishing social norms. Tamara, I'll let you go first, how did you establish them? Was it hard to do? Did they self self-generate and as a leader, do you have to police it or is it self policing? How's that working? And then Amy, from your point in terms of formal communication in a much bigger organization and being part of the HR office, one might say, isn't that already part of HR's charter? But how's that different now? Tamara, I'll let you go first. >> Sure, it's a great question because since we do have a remote workforce, one of the most salient things that I found to be critically important for productivity and collaboration and even cohesion and decreasing those silos between business unit is making sure that we form a community. And so what I mean by that is we have and always have had, we've been using video conferencing since before the pandemic and we have video conferencing meetings where video is on, so that's one of the parameters, is everybody needs to see everyone else's faces, and we have a morning kickoff meeting, an all hands meeting and then we have an end of week one as well and part of that piece, we call a standup where people either share something that's either a challenge within their workplace or with a customer or even in their own personal life, and then they end on something to celebrate because I think it's really important for us to cultivate that. But it really helps the teams to get to know one another. So just because someone in this business unit doesn't work with someone in this business unit, they know one another because of these team meetings that we have. And so I think creating a culture of positivity and collaboration versus competition and creating a culture where people feel a part of a team and a part of something bigger and where they see that their contribution makes a difference to the whole, creates a really delicious community that helps people feel valued at work. And I think with a remote workforce, you have got to pay attention to how you are creating that community and that feeling and sense of value to each and every individual within the organization. >> It's a very different kind of a challenge. Amy, your thoughts on more of a formal approach to establishing social norms to some of these big organizations, or do you treat it differently as a big organization or is it just a bunch of small little clusters of people that work together? >> I have so many thoughts on this, so I would love to have a two hour dialogue with both of you on this topic. Couple thoughts, there's implicit norms that develop organically, and then there's the explicit ones which for whatever reason we seem more hesitant to have very explicit conversations about norms. I don't know if people think it's tedious or something like that, I'm not sure, I haven't done that research yet. But in times of transition, it's so incredibly important just even for efficiency to add certainty, to make sure that everyone has the same message, same expectation to lean a little more heavily on the exquisite norms. Talking about how do we want to begin our meeting, let's reserve the first 10 minutes and just catch up like we would in the hallway. Some of that is a shift to how those meetings probably were happening two months ago. So making sure that everyone understands is that expectation and even little bit more of a warmup question. How's everybody feeling today? And even getting more specific, there is a couple of organizational gurus who I have been following quite a bit lately, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans, Aaron wrote a book called "Brave New Work" and they also have a podcast, but they really talk about the organization as an operating system. And when we look at norms, the norms are so much a part of that operating system and getting really clear about who does what here. There're things like how are not taken, how are we following up, in our current climate, who's checking on who? And so having some of those explicit conversations I think are incredibly important. And also for me with some of the work that I've been doing over the last six weeks is trying to harness goodness across the globe. So we have a group of site leaders who meet twice a week, their charge is to look after their location. So every location in the Citrix ecosystem that has more than 20 employees has a designated site leader during this time. And in bigger sites, they have pulled together committees, they're doing things that are local level to keep that site engaged, but what we're also looking to do is harness the best of the best. Some really amazing things, I did a radio calisthenic last night with our team in Tokyo. So something very true and personal to the Japanese culture but other sites, they're doing coffee chats and having drop-ins, celebrity guests, organizational leaders that are pretty high profile just popping in and out actively to have a very authentic Q&A conversations. There's some really inventive ideas to keep people engaged and also possibly establish new norm and I think that the question for me is, what do people like so much that they decide that it stays in place? When we do have of that thing and people are in the office more often, what level of connectivity will we keep? Even, will people start showering every day again? Some of these things, who knows what's going to happen? >> You make me want to go down to a to RNB and look in the meeting rooms at Intel, they used to have a very defined meeting, culture meeting, process meeting establishment, super efficient just like they're making chips. I wonder if they've changed a little bit in light of what's going on, but final note in terms of frequency and variety of communications. Both of you now have mentioned in the communications with your people and what you're hearing about is one is, you got to increase the frequency just period. And in fact, you might actually be communicating more frequently 'cause you don't necessarily chat all the time in the hallways when you're physically together. And the other thing that strikes me is the variety. It's not just the meeting, it's not just information exchange, it's touching base with community, it's establishing deeper relationships, it's doing some social things that, kind of the variety and the frequency of direct communication person to person, just not necessarily closer than six feet within one another has to go up dramatically, and is, as you're seeing in best practices in this new world. Amy, why don't you go first? >> I'm seeing a lot more Slack usage, we are an organization that has a multitude of tools to choose from, Slack being one of them, but highly engaged Slack community. The other thing that's become very clear as an insight is the more authentic the communication, the better. So our CEO, David Henshall has been doing video pieces and they had become increasingly more personal about whether it's his space where he exercises what he's doing for exercise, and the employee response has been deep appreciation for feeling several degrees more connected to our senior leadership. Other senior leaders on the team have profiled their own work from home antic in a very humorous way and so just finding inventive ways to leverage the communication vehicles we have, but at a level that is very true to the situation we're in and very human at their core. >> So Tamara, let me ask you a followup on that. You're big on social, it's a big part of your business helping other companies do better at social and engage in social, and it strikes me, especially in the real senior leadership ranks, there are those who tweet just to pick a platform, like Michael Dell, Sanjay Poonen, some CUBE alumni that you know, and then there's some that don't. And again, we talked about the contrast of IBM now, Ginny didn't tweet now, the new CEO announces it on LinkedIn. When you talk to CEOs and leaders about getting involved in social, I'm sure a lot of them that don't do it, just say the risk reward is not there, why am I going to expose some little personal tidbit of myself when the potential harm is great? But as we just heard from Amy, people like to know who the person is, people want to relate to who the person is. That's kind of part of the whole CUBE thing that we figured out a long time ago, is people are interested in the people that are behind the technology in the companies in the implementation. So how do you advise people, what do you see to convince them that, hey, it's actually in your best interest to show a little vulnerability, to show a little humanity, to maybe be scared sometimes and not necessarily have the right answer? How do you help coach them that these are good things, not bad things? >> It's so brilliant you brought this up, Jeff, because with the pandemic, a lot of the executives that were not on social media all of a sudden wanted to be on social media, and how do I do this, and how do I set up my thought leadership? Because this was a very primary mode of communication. And I think what we're seeing is that you do see a lot of the progressive CEOs and executive members on social media and then what you've outlined is there was a hesitancy by a lot of the CEOs who come from a different paradigm in which the hierarchal structure was such that they got to this level and why do I need to be on social media? And what we're seeing is that this push from the younger generational cohorts, which is they don't really see that hierarchal structure at all, and they want to be able to communicate with their CEO as much as they want to communicate with their manager. And when they can't, there is this distrust and you brought up the trust piece, which is huge. And I do know that a lot of global business leaders in highly regulated industries have been afraid, like in the financial services industry because there are a lot of rules and regulations. So I can understand and appreciate their hesitancy to be on social media, which is like a bit of the wild West. And you see those that are really pretty insulated from anything that they do, you can see like Elon Musk can tweet whatever he wants to tweet, and a lot of executives don't feel that they have that same sort of freedom. And so how we work with them, we work in the B2B and enterprise space is about what is it that you want to be known for? What is it that you're passionate about that would, Amy's point, be uplifting to those who not only work internally, your internal stakeholders, but to even your customers or those on the external, and stick to that? So no, you don't need to tweet about your political feelings, you don't need to tweet about sensitive subjects. We always say stay away from politics and religion, but you can absolutely establish a very authentic transparent, vulnerable thought leadership about the things that you care about. And we say pick three things. What three things do you want people to think of when you're not in the room? Pick three adjectives and then construct your editorial calendar, what you're doing on social media around how those three things are going to come to life. Through all of your email? Through your videos that you share with your community? And also what you're talking about on LinkedIn, Twitter and no, I'm not advising any of the executives to get on TikTok, but I do advise them to be on LinkedIn and Twitter. >> Matt Eastwood is starting to play with TikTok, so I don't know if you follow him on that, but he's a budding Casey Neistat. So I think he's getting into the TikTok thing, or even just TikTok edits, it's great. We could go on and on and on, and I really appreciate the time and it's just interesting again, pulling from Amy's blog post about leadership and you lead with trust, accountability, vulnerability, inclusion and communication. I think those are all human things and I think are so important. So final word, assuming things are going to get better in let's just say a year from now, we get back together and talk about how the new way to work has changed in a post COVID world, what do you hope that we'll be talking about that's different a year from now than we are today? Beyond obviously the COVID itself? Amy, you first. >> Wow. To narrow that down, I hope we are talking about how organizations have invested in helping our people find their strengths and feed with resilience and to understand what it is that helps them operate at their best, no matter what situation that you're in. >> That's great. Tamara? >> Me, Jeff, I'm going to hope that we are talking about the technology that's available a year from now that's going to help us have a much more immersive experience remotely working. So we'll be talking about hopefully things like the haptic internet, well that haptic interface with tactile internet and how AR, VR and mixed reality settings will help us as remote authors to feel like we're actually in meetings and having the same sort of experience that oftentimes we think we get only when we're at the building with everybody else. So I hope we're talking about how technology is really moving the needle forward to helping our remote workforce have that same experience and camaraderie and team building that they do in the physical space. >> Great. Well and again, there's this digital is different than physical, we're not together physically and we can't be right now, but we're together digitally. And so it's not the same, it's different, but there's a lot of good things about it too. So thank you both for taking the time, this has been a really great conversation. Amy, I agree with you, we could go for another couple of hours, but I think the crew would start throwing things at me. So I think we'll have to cut it off here. Thanks again and stay safe and really appreciate the time. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> Thank you. >> All right, thank you for tuning in, thanks for watching theCUBE, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from San Francisco it's theCUBE, covering RSA Conference 2019. Brought to you by Forescout. >> Hey welcome back everybody Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're at the RSA Conference in Moscone in San Francisco, they finally got the conversion done it looks beautiful, it's keeping the atmospheric river out (laughs) it didn't do that last week, but that's a different story for another day. We're excited to have our very next guest he's Joe Cardamone, he's the Senior Information & Security Analyst and North America Privacy Officer for Haworth. Joe great to meet you. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So for the people that don't know Haworth, give us kind of the quick overview on Haworth. >> Well Haworth is a global leader in commercial office interiors. They create seating, desks, dynamic work spaces, raise floors and movable walls. >> Okay, so really outfitting beyond the shell when people move into a space. >> That's correct. >> So what are your security, that sounds like, like mobile walls and desks and the like, what are some of the security issues that you have to deal with? >> Well obviously intellectual property is a big concern, protection of our, we call our employees members. So the protection of our employee member data is important to us, customer data, supplier data, so protection of those key data elements and our assets is a priority in my role. >> Okay, so we're in a Forescout booth, you're using their solution, you come in and Mike tells us you're connected to the network, it crawls out and tells us all the devices. How did that go? How well did it work for you guys? >> It was a fantastic experience for us to be honest with you. From the point that we deployed the ISO onto a virtual instance, about seven hours later we had gotten 97% visibility on our network. And not just data, actionable data which was really important in our use case, >> Yeah keep going, So, well I was just going to say how many surprises did you get after those hours when you got to report back? >> Oh we had quite a number. We were anticipating about 8,000 IPs we landed at about 13,000, so there was quite a bit more end points that we discovered, after implementing the product. One of the bigger pieces that we found was that our showrooms out in global sectors like Asia and Europe, had a bunch of APs that were stood up, you know some sales people thought that they wanted to plug them into a network jack and stand up their own wireless networks, we had found them and we were able to squash them pretty quickly, and that was within 24 hours of implementing the product. >> So you're expecting 8,000 you got 13,000 more than a 50% increase over what you thought? >> Quick math, correct, yes. >> I'm no quick and dirty math guy. I'm not a data scientist. >> I'm not either. >> Okay, so and then how many things did you have that were custom that needed to be added to the library? >> I'm going to say about 10 or 15 units, we have some that we produce. Haworth creates a unit called the Workwear unit which is a screen presentation casting device, and what that device does, it sits on our production network and in order for us to be able to demo that device we had to punch holes in our firewall. Very manual process, those devices move around very often and it was really hard for our IT teams to keep up with. How those devices move, how dynamic they are and you know code revisions, we're living showrooms so nothing stays in one spot at one time. The Forescout was able to very easily identify them using a couple of pieces of information that it gathered, and by using the Palo Alto Networks plugin, we were able to then dynamically punch holes through our firewall to our guest network for just those IPs, in just those services, and just those ports to enable our guests coming in who are looking to purchase the product to actually test drive it, and really have a good use with the product before purchasing it. >> So the guests that you're talking about are your customers, right? >> Our customers, correct yes. >> And when you say they wanted to test drive it, were they, do you let them go test drive it at their local office? Or are you let them drive their own content on it back at your like, executive briefing center? >> How does that mean, cause you're talking about punching a holes, right so that doesn't just happen without some thought. >> No it doesn't, exactly, and the thought was we can't sell a product if we can't demo it, and you come into Haworth, you're my guest. I want you to see the power of my product. I want you to use your laptop, your content on my screens and my space. How can we do that while protecting my digital network? And that's what the Forescout enables us to be able to do as part of our microsegmentation strategy with the Forescout. >> And then you said that that was tied to sub-functionality in a Palo Alto Networks device. >> That's correct. Like I mentioned earlier, the ability to have actionable data was one of our key points in purchasing employing the Forescout unit. We're experiencing a lot of growth, and the way we're treating our growth is, we're treating these companies like they are BYOD. We want, we're buying their brand, we're buying their ability to sell their product. They know their product, they have passion about their product. >> So these are new product lines within your guys total offering? >> Correct, yes. >> Okay. >> And what we wanted to do when we started to integrate the IT side of the world, we wanted to be able to keep them operating on their own. So, we're using the Forescout to be able to look into their network, and looking at a couple of key variables on their machines, say, do you meet this criteria? If you do then we're going to allow you to egress through our Palo Alto firewall using the Palo Alto Networks module on the Forescout, to be able to egress into our environment. If you don't meet that criteria, then you're just not getting in period. So we're able to provide a measure of control, trust but verify to the other networks that we have before their devices come into ours. >> So you're doing that you're adding all these, all these devices, you talk a lot about stuff that's actionable. What did you have before, or did you have anything before? What types of stuff that is actionable, how do you define actionable and I wonder if you could give a couple of examples. >> Sure that's actually really easy. When I say actionable data, I'm able to look at let's just say your laptop sitting here, with the Forescout, I can gather any multitude of data off of it, patch levels, OS levels, software installed, processes running, what switch port you're on, what wireless AP you're on, and off of all that information, I can make any number of decisions. I could move you to another VLAN, I could move you to another security group, I can tag your machine, I can send a trap to my SIM, and be able to record whatever data I need to record. In our use case, using the data that we're gathering from the affiliate networks and from the work wears we're able to then take action to say, yes this device meets our criteria, we can now send that data up into the Palo Alto and then tie it to a rule that exists to allow or disallow traffic. You know, with the fact that it's a single pane of glass, the fact that I can have my help desk go in and make decisions based on data that they're getting, based on actionable data, based on other pieces of data that are getting fed in through my environment, like indicators of compromise. I can enable my level one staff to be able to make level three decisions without giving them keys to the kingdom. Which I think is a big value with the Forescout. >> That's pretty impressive, cause that really helps you leverage your resources in a major major way. >> Correct, I'm a team of three. >> You're a team of three. >> Yes. >> (laughs) So more specifically I guess generally you know, talk about the role of automation because I don't know how many transactions are going through your system and how many pings are coming in but you said 13,000 devices just on the initial, on the initial ping, so how are you leveraging automation? What what's kind of the future do you see in terms of AI, machine learning and all these things we hear about because you can't hire you're way out of the problem, you've only got three people. >> Correct, correct right now we have limited staff but our skill set's fantastic. I'm blessed to have a team of really fantastic engineers that I work with. That being said, how the Forescout's helped us is being able to take some of the load off of them by automating tasks and some of that might be we have a machine that is not patched. We can identify that machine, put it into a group. Our servers are actually being patched by the Forescout right now, we're using that as a way to identify vulnerabilities, missing patches and then stage them into groups using the policies within the Forescout to be able to push down patches and you mentioned earlier one of the products that we had they gave us this visibility. We didn't really have anything. We had Forescout a number of years ago but we had some administration changes and we revamped our entire tool set. We came back and repurchased and re put in the Forescout in 2015, and that's where we've really been able to develop our current use cases and the strength behind the Forescout implementation that we have now. >> Right. And I'm just curious before we close are you, are you putting more IP connectivity on all of your kind of core SKUs? Are you seeing a potential benefit to put an IP address on a, on a wall, on a cube, on a desk, on all that stuff? How do you kind of see that evolving? >> I honestly see IoT being, you know, it's evolving very quickly obviously. We've got, we have IP addresses on our window blinds, you know. >> On your window blinds. >> Yeah, on our window blinds, so that they can control the amount of sunlight coming and we're LEED certified building. So we have all of these different IoT devices that control sunlight, control climate control in the building and obviously our production facilities have a lot of IoT devices as well and the Forescout helps us to be able to segment them into the correct VLANs, apply virtual firewalls, apply different changes to their own network. It gives us a lot of visibility and gives us a lot of control because of the granularity that it just natively collects. >> Right right. Well Joe, it's such a cool story you know. IP on shades that's my, that's my lesson of the day. (laughs) That it just shows that there's just so many opportunities to leverage this new technology in a very special way, but the complexity grows even faster right? >> It certainly does. >> Alright well thanks for taking a few minutes and I really enjoyed it. >> Awesome. >> Alright he's Joe, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're in the Forescout booth at RSA North America in Moscone Center thanks for watching we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBEConversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody Jeffrey here with theCUBE we're in our Palo Alto Studios the calendar has turned to late September I still can't believe it. We're still getting through the COVID issue and as we've seen in the news companies are taking all different types of tacts and how they're announcing kind of their go forward strategy with the many of them saying they're going to continue to have work from home or work from anywhere policies. And we're really excited to have our next guest from Citrix. He's Tim Minahan, the EVP of Strategy and the CMO of Citrix, Tim great to see you. >> Jeff, thanks for having me. >> Yeah so love having you guys on we had Tamara on and Amy Haworth this back in April when this thing was first starting and you know we had this light switch moment and everyone had to deal with a work from anywhere world. Now, it's been going on for over six months, people are making announcements, Google, Facebook, Twitter I'm out in the Valley so a lot of the companies here locally saying we're probably not going to have you back for a very long period of time. You guys have been in the supporting remote workers for a really long time, you're kind of like Zoom right place, right time, right market and then suddenly this light switch moment, it's a whole lot more important than it was before. We're six months into this thing what can you share that you've seen from your customers and kind of the transition that we've gone from kind of the shock and awe back in March to now we're in late September almost to October and this is going to continue for a while. >> Yeah, Jeff well, if there is any silver lining to the global crisis that we're all living through, it's that it has indeed caused organizations in all industries really to accelerate their digital transformation and to rethink how they work. And so at Citrix we've done considerable crisis scenario modeling. Engaging with our own customers, with government officials, with influencers around the globe really to determine how will the current environment change, cause companies to change their operating models and to prioritize their IT investments. And it really boils down to while there's variations by geography and sector, our modeling points to three major shifts in behavior. The first is looking for greater agility in their operations companies are adopting more variable operating models, literally in everything from their workforce strategy to the real estate strategy, to their IT strategy to allow them to scale up quickly to the next inevitable, unplanned event or opportunity. And for IT this typically means modernizing their application environment and taking that kind of one to three year cloud transition plan and accelerating it into a few months. The second thing we're seeing is because of the pandemic companies are realizing they need to prioritize employee experience to provide a consistent and secure work experience wherever work needs to get done. Whether that's in the office, whether that's on the road or increasingly whether that's at home and that goes beyond just traditional virtualization applications but it's also for delivering in a secure and unified environment. Your virtual apps alongside your SaaS apps, your web apps, your mobile apps, et cetera. And then finally, as companies rapidly move to the cloud and they adopt SaaS and they moved to these more distributed IT operating models, their attack surface from a security standpoint expands and they need to evolve their security model to one that is much more contextual and understands the behaviors and the access behaviors of individuals so if you're going to apply security policies and you'll keep your company information and application secure no matter where work is getting done. >> That's a great summary and you know there's been lots of conversation about security and increased attack surface but now you had a blog post that you published last month, September 15th, really interesting. And you talked about kind of COVID being this accelerant in work from home and we talk a lot about consumerization of IT and apps but we haven't talked a lot about it in the context of the employee experience. And you outlined some really great specific vocabulary those people need to be able to sit and think and create and explore the way they want so they can become what they can be free from the distractions at the same time you go through the plethora of I don't know how many business apps we all have to interact with every single day from Salesforce to Asana to Slack to Outlook to Google Drive to Box to et cetera, et cetera. And as you point out here the distractions in I think you said, "People are interrupted by a text, a chat or application alert every two minutes." So that there's this real battle between trying to do higher value work and less minutiae versus this increasing number of applications that are screaming for my attention and interrupting me anytime I'm trying to get something done. So how do you guys look at that and say, hey, we've got an opportunity to make some serious improvements so that you can get to that and cut the employee experience so they can deliver the higher value stuff and not just moving paper down the line. >> Yeah, absolutely Jeff, to your point you know a lot of the tools that we've introduced and adopted and the devices we've used in the like over the years certainly provide some advantages in helping us collaborate better, helping us execute business transactions and the like. However, they've also added a lot of complexity, right? As you said, typical employees use more than a dozen apps to get work done often four or more just to complete a single business process like submitting an expense or a purchase order or approving time off. They spend another 20% of their time searching for information they need to do their jobs across all of these different applications and collaboration channels and they are interrupted by alerts and texts and chats every few minutes. And that really keeps them from doing their core jobs and so Citrix is committed to delivering a digital workspace solutions that help companies transform employee experience to drive better business outcomes. And we do that in three ways. Number one is leveraging our heritage around delivering a unified and secure work environment. We bring all of the resources and employee needs together, your virtual apps and desktops, your SaaS apps, your web apps, your mobile apps, your information and your content into one unified experience. We wrapper that in a contextualized security model that doesn't get in the way of employees getting their job done but understands that employees, their behavior, their access protocols and assigns additional security policies, maybe a second level of authentication or maybe turning off certain features if they're behaving a little bit differently. But the key thing I think is that the third component we've also over the past several years infused within this unified workspace, intelligence, machine learning, workflows or micro apps that really remove that noise from your day, providing a personalized work stream to that individual employee and only offering up the individual tasks or the insights that they need to get their job done. Really guiding them through their day and automating some of that noise out of their day so they can really focus on being creative, focus on being innovative and to your point, giving them that space they need to succeed. >> Yeah, it's a great point, Tim and you know one of the hot buzz words that we hear all the time right now is artificial intelligence and machine learning. And people talk about it, it's kind of like big data where that's not really where the opportunity is in kind of general purpose AI as we've talked to people in natural language processing and video processing. It's really about application specific uses of AI to do something and I know you guys commissioned looks like a report called Work 2035. There's a nice summary that I was able to pull off the internet and there's some really positive things in here. It's actually, you know it got some good news in it about work being more flexible and new jobs will be created and productivity will get a major boost but the piece  I wanted to focus on which piggybacks on what you're just talking is the application of AI around a lot of specific tasks whether that's nudges, personal assistance, wearables that tell you to get up and stretch. And as I think and what triggered as you said, as this person is sitting at their desk trying to figure out what to do now, you've got your calendar, you've got your own tasks but then you've got all these notifications. So the opportunity to apply AI to help me figure out what I should be focusing on that is a tremendous opportunity and potential productivity enhancer, not to mention my mental health and positive attitude and engagement. >> Yeah, absolutely Jeff, and this Work 2035 project that we undertook is from a year long effort of research, quantitative research of business executives, IT executives supplemented with qualitative research with futurist work experts and the like to really begin a dialogue together with governments, with enterprises, with other technology companies about how we should be leveraging technology, how we should be changing our operating models and how we should be adapting our business culture to facilitate a new and better way to work. And to your point, some of the key findings are it's not going to be Skynet out there in the future. AI is not going to overtake all of our jobs and the like it is going to actually help us, you're going to see more of the augmented worker that really not only offers up the insights and the tasks like we just talked about when they're needed but actually helps us through decision-making helps us actually assess massive amounts of data to better engage with customers, better service healthcare to patients and the like. To your point, because of this some jobs certainly will be lost but new jobs will be created, right? And some people will need to be the coaches or trainers for these bots and robots. You'll see things like advanced data scientists becoming more in demand, virtual reality managers, privacy and trust managers. And then to your point, work is going to be more flexible we already talked about this but the ability to allow employees to perform at their best and give them all the resources they need to do so wherever work needs to happen, whether that's in the office, in the field or at home but importantly for businesses and even for employees this actually changes the dynamic of what we think about as a workforce. We can now tap into new pools of talent not just in remote locations but entire segments that had because of our traditional work hub model where I build a big office building or a call center and people have to commute there. Now they can work anywhere so you think about recent retirees that have a lot of domain expertise can get back into the workforce, stay at home parents or stay at home caregivers can actually engage and use their skills and expertise to reengage in that workforce. These are really, really exciting things and then the last thing is, it will help us improve employee engagement, improve wellness and improve productivity by having AI help us throughout our day, guiding us to the right decisions and automating tasks that typically added noise to our day so that we can focus on where we as humans are great which is some of the key decision-making, the creativity, the innovation to drive that next wave of growth for our companies. >> Yeah it's really interesting the kind of divergence that you're seeing with people in this opportunity, right? One of the benefits is that there is no script in how to move forward today, right? This has never happened before, especially at the scale so people are trying all kinds of things and you're talking about is a lot of positive uses of technology to an aide or to get blockers out of the way and help people do a better job. Unfortunately, there's this whole other track that we hear about, you know monitoring, are you in front of your desk, monitoring how many Zoom calls are you on a day, monitoring all these silly things that are kind of old school management of activity versus kind of new school managing of output. And we've done a lot of interviews on this topic, one of Darren Murph from GitLab great comments, does it now as a boss, your job should be removing blockers from your people to help them do a better job, right? That's such a different kind of mentality than managing their tasks and managing the minutiae. So really a lot of good stuff and we could go for a very long time and maybe we'll have a followup, but I want to shift gears a little bit here and talk about the other big delta that impacts both of you and I pretty dramatically and that's virtual events or the fact that basically March 15th there was no more gatherings of people, period. And you guys we've covered Citrix Synergy in the past but this year you guys have gone a different kind of tact. And again, I think what's so interesting about it is there is no right answer and everyone is trying to experiment and we're seeing all different ways to get your message to the market. But then the other really important part of events is getting leads, right? And getting engagement with your audience whether that's customers, whether that's partners, whether it's prospects, whether it's press and analysts and everything else. So I wonder if you can share with us kind of the thinking you had the benefit of kind of six months into this thing versus a couple of weeks which a few people had in early May, you know how did you kind of look at the landscape and how did you come to the conclusion that for you guys, it's this three event you've got Citrix Cloud on October 8th, Citrix Workspace Summit on October 22nd and Citrix Security Summit on October 29th. What did you think about before you came to this decision? >> Yeah, it's a great question, Jeff and certainly we put a lot of thought into it and to your point what helped clarify things for us is we always put the customer first. And so, like many other companies we did have our Big User Conference scheduled for the May timeframe, but you know considering the environment at that time and companies were just figuring out how to get their employees home and working securely and safely, how to maintain business continuity. We felt the inappropriate at time to be able to be talking about future innovations and so on and so forth. So we made the decision to kind of put an end to our Citrix Synergy for the year and instead, we went through all this scenario modeling as I mentioned and we've accelerated our focus and our investments and our partnerships to develop new innovations to help our customers achieve the three things that they prioritize which is accelerating that cloud transition, that hybrid multicloud transition plan, advancing their digital workspace and employee experience strategies and embracing a new, more contextual security framework. And so when we thought about how do we bring those announcements to market, how do we help educate our customers around these topics? It became very clear that we needed to design for digital attention spans which means it's not everything in the kitchen sink and we hope that we're bringing a whole bunch of different buying segments together and customer segments together and hope that they glean out the key insights we want. Instead, we wanted to be very focused around the cloud acceleration, the workspace and employee experience strategies and the security strategies is we created three separate summits. And even within the summits we've designed them for digital attention spans, no individual segment is going to be more than 20 minutes long. There'll be very descriptive so you can almost choose your own pathway as you go through the conference rather than having to commit a whole day or the likes you can get the information you need, it's supplemented by knowledge centers so you can go deeper if you want to and talk to some of our experts, if you want to. And it's certainly something we'll use to facilitate ongoing dialogue long after the day of event. >> Really interesting 20 minutes is the longest session. That is really progressive and again I think it's great to hear you say that you started from the perspective of the customer. I think so many people have basically started from the perspective of what did we do for the SaaS convention May five through eight in 2019 and then try to replicate that kind of almost one-to-one in a digital format which isn't really doing justice to either of the formats, I think and not really looking at the opportunity that digital affords that physical doesn't and we just getting together and grabbing a coffee or a drink or whatever in those hallways but there's a whole lot of things that you can do on a digital event that you can't do in a physical event. And we're seeing massive registration and more importantly, massive registration of new people that didn't have the ability couldn't afford it, couldn't get away from the shop whatever the reason is that that the physical events really weren't an option. So I think instead of focusing on the lack of hallway chatter spend your time focusing on the things you can do with this format that you couldn't before. And I think removing the space-time bounds of convention space availability and the limited number of rooms that you can afford, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the budget this really does open up a very different way to get your message to market. >> It does, Jeff and what I'm excited about is what does it mean for the future of events overall? I think there's going to be some very valuable lessons learned for all of us in the industry and I expect just like work won't be the same when we return back to the office, post-pandemic. I don't think the events approach that companies take is going to be quite the same as it was previous and I think that'll be a good thing. There'll be a lot of lessons learned about how people want to engage, how to reach new segments, as you mentioned. And so I think you'll see a blended events strategy from companies across the industry going forward. >> Yeah. And to your point, event was part of your communication strategy, right? It was part of your marketing strategy it is part of your sales strategy so that doesn't necessarily all have to again be bundled into one week in May and can be separated. Well, Tim really, really enjoyed the conversation I have to say your blog posts had some really kind of really positive things in it in terms of the way people should be thinking about their employees not as resources but as people which is one of my pet peeves I'm not a big fan of the human resources word and I really was encouraged by some of the stuff coming out of this 2035 I think you said it's going to be an ongoing project so it'll be great to see what continues to come out because I don't know how much of that was done prior to COVID or kind of augmented after COVID but I would imagine the acceleration on the Delta is going to go up dramatically over the next several months or certainly over the next couple of years. >> Yeah, Jeff, I would say I think Winston Churchill said it best "Never waste a good crisis." And smart companies are doing that right now. I think there's going to be a lot of lessons learned there's going to be a lot of acceleration of the digital transformation and the work model transformations and the business model transformations that companies have had on the radar but haven't really been motivated to do so. And they're really accelerating those now I think that the world of work and the world of IT is going to look a heck of a lot different when we emerge from all of this. >> Yep, yep. I agree well, Tim thank you again for sharing your insight, sharing your information and is great to catch up. >> You too. >> Alright, take care. >> I know. >> He's Tim, I'm Jeff you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching we'll see you next time.