>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering LiveWorx 18, brought to you by PTC. (light electronic music) >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering day one of the LiveWorx conference that's hosted by PTC. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. Professor Linda A. Hill is here. She's the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Professor Hill, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, innovation, lot of misconceptions about innovation and where it stems from. People think of Steve Jobs, well, the innovation comes from a single leader and a visionary who gets us in a headlock and makes it all happen. That's not really how innovation occurs, is it? >> No, it is not, actually. Most innovation is the result of a collaboration amongst people of different expertise and different points of view, and in fact, unless you have that diversity and some conflict, you rarely see innovation. >> So this is a topic that you've researched, so this isn't just an idea that you had. You've got proof and documentation of this, so tell us a little more about the work that you do at Harvard. >> So really over 10 years ago, I began to look at the connection between leadership and innovation, because it turns out that like a lot of organizations, the academy is quite siloed, so the people studying innovation were very separate from the ones who studied leadership, and we look at the connection between the two. When you look at that, what you discover is that leading innovation is actually different from leading change. Leading change is about coming up with a vision, communicating that vision, and inspiring people to want to fulfill that vision. Leading innovation is not about that. It's really more about how do you create a space in which people will be willing and able to do the kind of collaborative work required for innovation to happen? >> Sometimes I get confused, maybe you can help me, between invention and innovation. How should we think about those two dimensions? >> Innovation and invention. The way I think about it is an innovation is something that's both an invention, i.e. new, plus useful. So it can be an innovation or it can be creative, but unless it's useful and addresses an opportunity or a challenge that an organization faces, for me, that's not an innovation. So you need both, and that is really the paradox. How do you unleash people's talents and passions so you get the innovation or the invention or the new, and then how do you actually combine that, or harness all of those different ideas so that you get something that is useful, that actually solves a problem that the collective needs solved? >> So there's an outcome that involves changing something, adoption, as part of that innovation. >> For instance, one of the things that we're doing a lot right now is we're working with organizations, incumbents, I guess you'd call them, that have put together these innovation labs to create digital assets. And the problem is that those digital assets get created, they're new, if you will, but unless the core business will adopt them and use them, they get implemented, they're not going to be useful. So we're trying to understand, how do you take what gets created in those innovation labs, those assets, if you will, and make sure that the organization takes them in and scales them so that you can actually solve a business problem? >> Professor Hill, a fascinating topic I love digging into here. Because you see so many times, startups are often people that get frustrated inside a large company. I've worked for some very large companies, so which have had labs, or research division, and even when you carve aside time for innovation, you do programs on that, there's the corporate antibodies that fight against that. Maybe talk a little bit about that dynamic. Can large companies truly innovate? >> Yes, large companies can truly innovate. We do see it happening, it is not easy by any means, and I think part of the dilemma for why we don't see more innovation is actually our mindset about what leadership is about and who can innovate. So if I could combine a couple of things you asked, invention, often when we talk to people about what is innovation, they think about technology, and they think about new, and if I'm not a technologist and I'm not creative, then I can't play the game. But what we see in organizations, big ones that can innovate, is they don't separate out the innovators from the executors. They tell everybody, guess what, your job no matter who you are, of course you need to deal with making sure we get done what we said we'd deliver, but if we're going to delight our customers or we're ever going to really get them to be sticky with us, you also need to think about not just what should you be doing, but what could you be doing. In the literature, in the research, that's called how do you close an opportunity gap and not just a performance gap? In the organizations we look at that are innovative, that can innovate time and again, they have a very democratic notion: everybody has a role to play. So our work, Collective Genius, is called Collective Genius because what we saw in Pixar was the touchstone for that work, is that they believe everybody has a slice of genius. They're not equally big or whatever, but everybody has a contribution to make, and you need to use yours to come up with what's new and useful. A lot of that will be incremental, but some of it will be breakthrough. So I think what we see with these innovation labs and the startups, if you will, is that often people do go to start them up, of course they eventually have to grow their business, so a part of what I find myself doing now is helping startups that have to scale, figure out how to maintain that culture, those capabilities, that allowed them to be successful in the first place, and that's tough one for startups, right? >> Yeah, I think Pixar's only about a 1,500 person company and they all have creativity in wat they do. I'm wondering if there's some basic training that's missing. I studied engineering and I didn't get design training in my undergraduate studies. It wasn't until I was out in the workforce that I learned about that. What kind of mindset and training do you have to do to make sure the people are open to this? >> One of the things that I did related to this is about five years ago, I told our dean of Harvard Business School that I needed to join the board of an organization called Arts Center. I don't know if you were aware of Arts Center in Pasadena. It's the number one school of industrial design in the U.S., and people don't know about it 'cause I always laugh at them. The man who designed the Apple store is a graduate there. The man who designed Tesla car and et cetera, so they're not so good at it, but one of the things that we've all come to understand is design thinking, lean startup, these are all tools that can help you be better at innovation, but unless you create an environment around that, people are going to be willing to use those tools and make the missteps, the failures that might come with it, know how to collaborate together, even when they're a large organization, I mean it's easier when you're smaller. But unless you know how to do all that, those tools, the lean startup or digital or design thinking or whatever, ' cause I'm working with a lot of the people who do that, and deep respect for them, nothing gets done. In the end, we are human, we all need to know first off that it's worthwhile to take the risk to get done whatever it is you want to get done, so what's the purpose of the work, how's it going to change the world? The second thing is we need to share a set of values about learning because we have to understand, as you well know, you cannot plan your way to an innovation, you have to act your way. And with the startup, you act as fast as you can, right, so somebody will give you enough money before you run out of money. Same similar process you have to do in a large company, an incumbent, but of course it's more complicated. The other thing that makes it more complicated is companies are global, and the other part of it that makes it more complicated that I'm seeing like in personalized medicine: you need to build an ecosystem of different kinds, of nanotechnologists, biotechnologists, different expertise to come together. All of this, frankly, you don't learn any of it in school. I remember learning that you can't teach anyone how to lead. You actually have to help people learn how to lead themselves and technologists will frequently say to me, i don't know why, you're a leadership professor? Well, this is a technical problem. We just haven't figured out the platform right, and once we get it right, all will be. No, once you get it right, humans are still going to resist change and not know how to necessarily learn together to get this done. >> I wonder if, are there any speacial leadership skills we need for digital transformation? Really kind of the overarching theme of the show here, help connect the dots for us. >> So the leading change piece is about having a vision, communicating it, and inspiring people. What it really does turn out when we look at exceptional leaders of innovation, and all of us would agree that they've done wonderful things time and again, not just once, they understand that is collective. They spend time building a culture and capabilities that really will support people collaborating together. The first one they build is, how do we know how to create a marketplace of ideas through debate and discourse? Yeah, you can brainstorm, but eventually, we have to abrade and have conflict. They know how to have healthy debates in which people are taught terms of skills, basic stuff, not just listening and inquiring, but how to actively advocate in a constructive way for your point of view, these leaders have to learn how to amplify difference, whereas many leaders learn how to minimize it. And as the founder of Pixar once said, you can never have too many cooks in the kitchen. Many people believe you can. It's like today, you need as much talent as you can get. Your job as a leader, what are the skills you need to get those top cooks to be able to cook a meal together, not to reduce the amount of diversity. You got to be prepared for the healthy fight. >> You've pointed this out in some of your talks is that you've got to have that debate. >> Yes, you have to. >> That friction, to create innovation, but at the same time it has to be productive. I know it can be toxic to an organization, maybe talk about that a little. >> I think one of the challenges is what skills do people need to learn? One is, how do you deal with conflict when people are very talented and passionate? I think many people avoid conflict or don't know how to engage that constructively, just truly don't, and they avoid it. I find that many times organizations aren't doing what they need to do because the leadrr is uncomfortable. The other thing, and I'm going to stereotype horribly here, but I'm an introvert, that book quiet is wonderful, but one of the challenges you have if you're more introverted or if you're more technical and you tend to look at things from a technical point of view, in some ways is that you often find the people with that kind of, that's what drives them, there's a right answer, there's a rational answer we need to get through or get to, as opposed to understanding that really innovative ideas are often the combination of ideas that look like they're in conflict initially, and by definition, you need to have the naive eye and the expert working together to come up with that innovative solution, so for someone who's a technologist to think they should listen to someone who's naive about a technical problem, just the very basic mindset you have about who's going to have the idea. So that's a tricky one, it's a mindset, it's not even just a skill level, it's more, who do you think actually is valuable? Where is that slice that you need at this moment going to come from? It may not be from that expert, it may be from the one who had no point of view. I heard a story that I was collecting my data, and apparently, Steve Jobs went to see Ed Land. We're here in Boston over Polaroid, which is one of our most innovative companies, right, in the history. And he said, what do I need to learn from you? And what Land said to him is, whenever my scientist and technologist get stuck, I have some of the art students or the humanities students come in and spend time in the lab. They will ask the stupid question because they don't know it's stupid. The expert's not going to ask the stupid question, particularly the tech expert, not going to ask it. They will ask the question that gets the first principles. I think, but I wouldn't want to be held to this, the person who was telling me the story, that's partly how they came up with the instant camera. Some naive person said, why do I have to wait? Why can't I have it now? And of course, silly so-and-so, you don't know it takes this, that, and the others. Then someone else thought, why does she have to wait? I think it was really a she who asked the question, the person telling me this, and they came up with a different way. Who said it has to be done in a darkroom in that way? I think that there's certain things about our mindset independently of our skill, that get in the way of our actually hearing all the different voices we need to hear to get that abrasion going in the right way. >> Listening to those Columbo questions, you say, can sometime lead to an outcome that is radically different. There's a lot of conversation in our industry, the technology industry, about, we call it the cordially shock clock, the companies are on a cordially reporting mechanism or requirement from the SEC. A lot of complaints about that, but at the same time, it feels like at least in the tech business, that U.S. companies tend to be more innovative. But again, you hear a lot of complaints about, well, they can't think for the long term. Can you help us square that circle? >> It's funny, so one thing is you rarely ever get innovation without constraint. If you actually talk to people who are trying to innovate, there needs to be the boundaries around it in which they're doing the constraint. To be completely free rarely leads to, it is the constraint. Now we did do a study of boards to try to understand when is a board facilitating innovation and when is a board interfering with it? We interviewed CEOs and lead directors of a number of companies and wrote an article about that last year, and what we did find is many boards actually are seen as being inhibitors. They don't help management make the right decision. Then of course the board would say now management's the one that's too conservative, but this question about how the board, with guidance, and all of these issues have come up when you're looking at research analysts and who you play to, and I've been on corporate boards. One thing is that the CEO needs to know that the board is actually going to be supportive of his or her choices relative to how you communicate why you're making the choices you're making. So there is pressure, and I think it's real. We can't tell CEOs, no, you don't need to care about it, 'cause guess what, they do get in trouble if they don't. On the other hand, if they don't know how to make the argument for investing in terms of helping the company grow, so in the long run, innovation is not innovation for innovation's sake, it's to meet customer needs so you can grow, so you need to have a narrative that makes sense and be able to talk with people, the different stakeholders, about why you're making certain choices. I must say that I think that many times companies may be making the right choice for the long haul, and get punished in the short run, for sure that happens, but I also think that there are those companies that get a way with a lot of investment in the long haul, partly because they do, over time, deliver, and there is evidence that they're making the right choices or have built a culture where people think what they're saying might actually happen or be delivered. What's happening right now because of the convergence of industries, is I think a lot of CEOS, it's a frightening time, it is difficult to sustain success these days, because what you have to do is innovate at low cost. Going back to some other piece about boards, one of the things we've found is so many board members define innovation as being technology. Technology has a very important enabling role to play in otherwise, but they have such a narrow definition of it in a way that again, they create a culture to let the people in the innovation lab innovate, but not one where everybody understands that all of us, together, need to innovate in ways that will also prepare us to execute better. They don't see the whole culture transformation, digital transformation often requires cultural transformation for you to be able to get this stuff done, and that's what takes a long time. Takes a long time to get rid of your legacy systems and put in these new, or get that balance right, but what takes even longer is getting the culture to be receptive to using that new data capability they have and working in different ways and collaborating when they've been very siloed and they're paid to be very siloed. I think that unless you show, as a CEO, that you are actually putting all of those building blocks in place, and that's what you're about, you understand it's a transformation at that level, you're just talking to the analysts about, we're going to do x, and there's no evidence about your culture or anything else going on, how you're going to lead to attract and retain the kind of talent you need, no one's buying that, I think that that's the problem. There's not a whole story that they're telling about how this goes together and they're going to move forward on it. >> To your other point, is there data to suggest, can you quantify the relationship between diversity and innovation? >> There are some data about that, I don't have it. I find it's very funny, as you can see, I'm an African-American woman. My work is on leadership globalization and innovation. I do a lot of work on how you deliver global strategies. I often find when I'm working with senior teams, they'll ask me, would you help us with our inclusion effort? And I think it's partly because of who I am and diversity comes up in our work, and if you actually build the environments for talking about, they tend to be more inclusive about diversity of thought. Not demographic diversity, those can be separate as we well know because we know Silicon Valley is not a place where you see a lot of demographic diversity, but you might see diversity of thought. I haven't asked, it's interesting, I have had some invitations by governments, too. Japan, which has womenomics, which is a part of their policy If they need to get more women in the economy, frankly, otherwise they can't grow as an economy. It turns out that the innovation story is the business case that many businesses or business people find one that they can buy into, doesn't feel like you're doing it 'cause it's the right thing, or not that you shouldn't do the right thing, but helping them understand how you really, really make sure that the minority voice is heard, and I mean minority of thought, independent of demographic, but if you create an environment as a leader where you actually run your team so that people do feel they can speak up, as you all know. It's so often, I'll talk to people afterwards and they'll say, I didn't say what I really thought about those ideas because I didn't want to be punished or I didn't want to step in that person's territory. People are making decisions based on varying complete information everyone knows. What often happens is it gets escalated up. We had this one senior team complaining, everything is so slow here, a very big bank, not the one I'm on the board of, another very big bank we're working with. Everything's so slow, people won't do anything. So when we actually ask people, what's happening? Why aren't you making decisions? First off, decisions making rights are very fuzzy in this organization, except for at the very top, so what they say is all decisions, actually, they're made on the 34th floor. We escalate 'cause if you make a decision, they're going to turn it over anyway, so we've backed off, or we don't say what we think 'cause I don't want them to say what they think about my ideas 'cause we actually have very separate business units here. >> We might get shot. >> You might get shot. That's the reality that many people live in, so we're not surprised to see that not very many organizations can innovate time and again when we think about the reality of what our contexts are. The good news for us is that in part, millennials won't tolerate some of these environments in the same way, which is going to be a good thing. I think they're marvelous to work with, I'm not one of them obviously, but I think a lot of what they're requesting, the transparency, the understanding the connections between what they do and are they having impact, the desire to be developed and be learning, and wanting to be an organization they're not ashamed of but in fact they're very proud to be a part of what's happening there, I think that that requires businesses and leaders to behave differently. One of the businesses we studied, if the millennial wants to know who's on the front line, he or she is making a difference. They had to do finance differently to be able to show, to draw the cause and effect between what that person was doing every day and how it impacted the client's work. That ended up being a really interesting task. Or a supply chain leader, who really needed them to think very differently about supply chain so they could innovate. What he ended up doing is, instead of thinking about our customers being the pharmaceutical company, the CBS or the big hospital chain or whatever it is, think about the end customer. What would we have to do with supply chain to ensure that that end patient took his or her pill on time and got better? And when they shifted the whole meaning of the work to that individual patient in his or her home, he was able, over time, to get the whole supply chain group organization to understand, we're not doing what we need to do if we're really going to reduce diabetes in the world because the biggest problem we have is not when they go and get their medication, it's whether they actually use it properly when they're there. So when you switched it to that being the purpose of the work, the mindset that everyone had to have, that's what we're delivering on. Everyone said, oh, this is completely appropriate, we needed digital, we need different kind of data to know what's going on there. >> Don't get me started on human health. Professor Hill, for an introvert, you're quite a storyteller, and we appreciate you sharing your examples and your knowledge. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. It was great to meet you. >> Been my pleasure, glad to know you, thank you. >> Keep it right there, everybody, Stu and I will be back right after this short break. You're watching the Cube from LiveWorx in Boston. We'll be right back. (light electronic music)

>>from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I. F s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I F s. Hi, buddy. Welcome to Boston. You're watching the cubes coverage of I s s World in the Heinz Auditorium in Boston. I'm Day Volonte with my co host, Paul Gill and Paul. This is the the largest enterprise resource planning software company that our audience probably has never heard of. This is our second year covering I f s World. Last year was in Atlanta. They moved to Boston. I f s is a Swedish based company. They do about $600 million in annual revenue, about 3700 employees. And interestingly, they have a development center in Sri Lanka, of all places. Which is kind of was war torn for the last 15 years or so, but nonetheless, evidently, a lot of talent and beautiful views, but so welcome. >>Thank you, Dave. I have to admit, before our coverage last year, I had never even heard of this company been around this industry for more than 30 years. Never heard of this company. They've got 10,000 customers. They've got a full house next door in the keynote and very enthusiastic group. This is a focus company. It's a company that has a lot of ah ah, vision about where wants to go some impressive vision documents and really a company that I think it's coming out of the shadows in the U. S. And it will be a force to be reckoned with. >>So I should say they were founded in the in the mid 19 eighties, and then it kind of re architected their whole platform around Client server. You remember the component move? It was a sort of big trends in the in the nineties. In the mid nineties opened up offices in the United States. We're gonna talk to the head of North America later, and that's one of the big growth areas that growing at about three. They claim to be growing at three x the overall market rate, which is a good benchmark. They're really their focus is really three areas e r. P asset management software and field service management, and they talk about deep functionality. So, for instance, they compete with Oracle ASAP. Certainly Microsoft and in four company we've covered in four talks a lot about the last mile functionality. That's not terminology that I f s uses, but they do similar types of things. I'll give you some examples because, okay, what's last mile? Functionality? Things like, um, detailed invoicing integration, contract management. Very narrow search results on things like I just want to search for a refurbished parts so they have functionality to allow you to do that. Chain. A custom e custody chain of custody for handling dangerous toxic chemicals. Certain modules to handle FDA compliance. A real kind of nitty gritty stuff to help companies avoid custom modifications in certain industries. Energy, construction, aerospace and defense is a big area for that. For them, a CZ well as manufacturing, >>there's a segment of the e r P market that often is under uh is under seeing. There's a lot of these companies that started out in niches Peoples off being a famous example, starting out on a niche of the market and then growing into other areas. And this company continues to be very focused even after 35 years, as you mentioned, just energy aerospace, a few construction, a few basic industries that they serve serve them at a very deep level focused on the mid market primarily, but they have a new positioning this year. They're calling the challengers for the challengers, which I like. It's a it's a message that I think resonates. It's easy to understand there position their customers is being the companies that are going to challenge the big guys in their industries and this time of digital transformation and disruption. You know, that's what it's all about. I think it's a great message of bringing out this year. >>Of course I like it because the Cube is a challenger, right? Okay, even though we're number one of the segments that we cover, we started out as a sort of a challenger. Interestingly, I f s and the gardener Magic Corners actually, leader and Field Service Management. They made an acquisition that they announced today of a company called Asked. He asked, U S he is a pink sheet OTC company. I mean, they're very small is a tuck in acquisition that maybe they had a They had a sub $20 million market cap. They probably do 25 $30 million in revenue. Um, Darren rules. The CEO said that this place is them is the leader in field service management, which is interesting. We're gonna ask him about that to your other point. You look around the ecosystem here that they have 400 partners. I was surprised last night. I came early to sort of walk around the hall floor. You see large companies here like Accenture. Um and I'm surprised. I mean, I remember the early days when we did the service. Now conferences 2013 or so you didn't see accent. You're Delloye E Y p W c. Now you see them at the service now event here that you see them? I mean, and I talked to essential last night. They said, Yeah, well, we actually do a lot of business in Europe, particularly in the Scandinavian region, and we want to grow the business in the U. S. >>Europe tends to be kind of a blind spot for us cos they don't see the size of the European market, all the activities where some of the great e. R. P. Innovation has come out of Europe. This company, as you mentioned growing three times the rate of the market, they have a ah focus on your very tight with those customers that they serve and they understand them very well. And this is a you can see why it's centuries is is serving this market because, you know they're simply following the money. There's only so much growth left in the S a P market in the Oracle market. But as the CEO Darren said this morning, Ah, half of their revenues last year were from net new customers. So that's that's a great metric. That indicates that there's a lot of new business for these partners to pursue. >>Well, I think there's there's some fatigue, obviously, for big, long multi year s AP integrations, you're also seeing, you know, at the macro we work with Enterprise Technology Research and we have access to their data set. One of the things that we're seeing is a slowdown in the macro. Clearly, buyers are planning to spend less on I T in the second half of 2019 than they did in the first half of 2019 and they expect to spend less in Q four than they expected to in July. So things are clearly softening at the macro level. They're reverting back to pre 2018 levels but it's not falling off a cliff. One of the things that I've talked to e t. R about the premise we put forth love to get your thoughts is essentially we started digital transformation projects, Let's say in earnest in 2016 2017 doing a lot of pilots started kind of pre production in 2018. And during that time, what people were doing is they were had a lot of redundancy. They would maintain the legacy systems and they were experimenting with disruptive technologies. You saw, obviously a lot of you. I path a lot of snowflake and other sort of disruptive technology. Certainly an infrastructure. Pure storage was the beneficiary of that. So you had this sort of dual strategy. We had redundancy of legacy systems, and then the new stuff. What's happening now is, is the theory is that we're going into production. Would digital transformation projects and where were killing the legacy stuff? Okay, we're ready to cut over >>to a new land on that anymore, >>right? We're not going to spend them anymore. Dial that down. Number one. Number two is we're not just gonna spray and pray on all new tech Blockchain a i rp et cetera. We're gonna now focus on those areas that we think are going to drive business value. So both the incumbents and the disruptors are getting somewhat affected by that. That slowdown in that narrowing of the focused. And so I think that's really what's happening. And we're gonna, I think, have to absorb that for a year or so before we start to see new wave of spending. >>There's been a lot of spending on I t over the last three years. As you say, driven by this need, this transition that's going on now we're being going to see some of those legacy systems turned off. The more important thing I have to look at, I think the overall spending is where is that money being spent is being spent on on servers or is it being spent on cloud service is, and I think you would see a fairly dramatic shift going on. They're so the overall, the macro. I think it's still healthy for I t. There's still a lot of spending going on, but it's shifting to a new area there. They're killing off some of that redundancy. >>Well, the TR data shows couple things. There's no question that server and storage spending is has been declining and attenuating for a number of quarters now. And there's been a shift going on from that. Core infrastructure, obviously, into Cloud Cloud continues its steady march in terms of taking over market share. Other areas of bright spots security is clearly one. You're seeing a lot of spending in an analytics, especially new analytics. I mentioned Snowflake before we're disrupting kind of terror Data's traditional legacy enterprise data warehouse market. The R P. A market is also very hot. You AI path is a company that continues to extend beyond its its peers, although I have to say automation anywhere looks very strong. Blue Prison looks very strong. Cloudera interestingly used to be the darling is hitting sort of all time lows in the E. T R database, which is, by the way, that one of the best data sets I've ever seen on on spending enterprise software is actually still pretty strong. Particularly, uh, you know, workday look strong. Sales force still looks pretty strong. Splunk Because of the security uplift, it still looks pretty strong. I have a lot of data on I f s Like you said, they don't really show up in the e t R survey base. Um, but I would expect, with kind of growth, we're seeing $600 million. Company hopes to be a $1,000,000,000 by 2022 2021. I would think they're going to start showing up in the spending >>service well again in Europe. They may be They may be more dominant player than we see in the US. As I said, I really had not even heard of the company before last year, which was surprising for a company with 10,000 customers. Again, they're focused on the mid market in the mid market tends to fly a bit under the radar. Everyone thinks about what's happening in the enterprise is a huge opportunity out there. Many more mid market companies and there are enterprises. And that's a that's been historically a fertile ground for e. R. P. Companies to launch. You know J. D. Edwards came out of the mid market thes are companies that may end up being acquired by the Giants, but they build up a very healthy base of customers, sort of under the radar. >>Well, the other point I wanted to make I kind of started to about the digital transformation is, as they say, people are getting sort of sick of the big, long, ASAP complicated implementations. As small companies become midsize companies and larger midsize companies, they they look toward an enterprise resource planning, type of, of platform. And they're probably saying, All right, wait. I've got some choices here. I could go with an an I F. S, you know, or maybe another alternative. T s a p. You know, A S A P is maybe maybe the safe bet. Although, you know, it looks like i f s is got when you look around at the customers, they have has some real traction, obviously a lot of references, no question about it. One of things they've been digging for saw this gardener doing them for a P I integrations. Well, they've announced some major AP I integrations. We're gonna talk to them about that and poke it that a little bit and see if that will So to solve that criticism, that what Gardner calls caution, you know, let's see how real that is in talking to some of the customers will be talkinto the executives on members of the ecosystem. And obviously Paul and I will be giving our analysis as well. Final thoughts >>here. Just the challenge, I think, is you note for these midmarket focus Cos. Has been growing with their customers. And that's why you see of Lawson's in the JD Edwards of the World. Many of these these mid market companies eventually are acquired by the big E R P vendors. The customers eventually, if they grow, have to go through this transition. If they're going to go to Enterprise. The R P you know, they're forced into a couple of big choices. The opportunity and the challenge for F s is, can they grow those customers as they move into enterprise grade size? Can they grow them with with E. I. F s product line without having them forcing them to transition to something bigger? >>So a lot of here a lot of action here in Boston, we heard from several outside speakers. There was Linda Hill from Harvard. They had a digital transformation CEO panel, the CEO of soo say who will be on later uh PTC, a Conway, former PeopleSoft CEO was on there. And then, of course, Tony Hawk, which was a lot of fun, obviously a challenger. All right, so keep it right there, buddy. You're watching the Cube live from I F s World Conference at the Heinz in Boston right back, right after this short break.

>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering LiveWorx 18. Brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody, to the LiveWorx show, hashtag LiveWorx with an "x" at the end. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live-tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host Stu Miniman. Mario Armstrong is here. He's a two-time Emmy winner, contributor to NBC today. He's the creator of the "Never Settle Show". He's an NPR contributor. >> Yep. >> And the host of LiveWorx. >> Yeah! >> Thanks so much coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's a pleasure to see both of you. Good to see you too, Stu. Thanks for having me on the show. >> So yeah, this morning, a lot of action-- >> Yes. >> First of all, I tweeted out, that was like an Olympic opening, I mean-- >> That open was phenomenal. I mean, an LED-lit troop, full LED uniforms on, being acrobatic, what you can't see behind the scenes, by the way, 'cause you think it's kind of like Cirque du Soleil type of thing, with like, tech, but what you don't see are, like, these three other people that are way in the back behind the scenes, going up, scaling up and down like this truss that's like dropping them or raising them. It's just, the performance was phenomenal. >> Yeah, it was really great. And you kicked it off... 6,000 plus people here. >> Yes. >> You said the largest digital transformation conference on the planet, which of course, we were joking. Everybody says their digital-- >> Yeah. (laughs) >> But this really is digital transformation, isn't it? >> It's a lot that's taking place. I mean when you think about manufacturing, smart manufacturing, when you think about how you're trying to accelerate processes and you start looking at where things were like 20 or 30 years ago and how physical things had to be and how you actually had to, like, maybe even work on a thing then leave it, go to another place, report on it, come back to it, tweak it, and so now when you start seeing the merging of AI, VR, and so you're taking the physical and the human, and you're putting these... and the virtual, and you're putting these things together, you're seeing things like what PTC is showing us today. I mean, some of the demonstrations that I saw were absolutely mind blowing in terms of the acceleration of the process that you can actually get things done with how they're merging the different technologies and integrating them together. >> Yes, Stu and I, we're talking earlier, it's hard to get your head around this whole IOT, industrial IOT, there's just so many segments, it's so fragment that, and it's-- >> Yeah. >> It's enormous, it's almost impossible to size, I mean it's trillion dollars, this whole economy of its own. What are your takeaways on just that whole space? >> You know, a lot of what I focus on, too, when I'm doing everything from NBC or NPR and stuff like that is on the consumer impact. So I'm looking at the consumer side but I'm also an entrepreneur, so I'm thinking about what's happening on the business side. And when I see on both ends, you're absolutely right. The field is enormous when you really think about it. Whether you want to look at how we can replace old school manufacturing and how this is going to transfer... That's a whole sector just in it of itself. We haven't even now talked about, you know, AI for children or for (incoherent) or for the health and wellness sector, whole other sector that's looking at IOT and the power of that. I mean, being able to look at.. I was just in one of the other, in the deluxe lounge and I was checking out one of our fun games. It's called Sphero. It's a consumer game, but its a small ball that you control through VR and AR on your phone, but you can actually use the phone to program things in real time to make it respond in real time. So all of these things together, to me, start to paint this large ecosystem because now you have kids that are growing up using devices and using technologies that we're just starting to get our hands on but this is how they're solving problems and thinking about things already. So when this economy and this ecosystem starts to mature, you're going to have a ready-made audience that's already been exposed to 90% of this. >> Well, and Stu I wonder if you could chime into it, it makes me think that these worlds, even though consumer and industrial are so seemingly different, it seems like parts of them, anyway, adjacencies are coming together. >> Absolutely. And there's always going to be that... There's always going to be... Look, when I talk about innovation and whether you look at Dr. Hill, who's speaking here today, Dr. Linda Hill from Harvard and others, when I look at it, she calls it creative abrasion, like the difference between brainstorming and actually utilizing new ideas to create new concepts. I call it hybrid design. Normally, it's taking something that you know exists and then taking two things that don't seem to go together-- that's normally where you find creation. I don't like to say disruption, I like to say creation. >> Yeah, actually there's a good friend of mine that I work with and I worked at EMC, he called it venn diagram innovation. >> Oh, that's it! That's it! >> I take a few things and I put it together and we were talking about the consumer side-- >> Yeah! >> We've looked so many technologies, you get the scale usually from the consumer. When we look at things like flash in all of our devices-- >> That's right. >> Really enabled the enterprise to do things. The VR and AR is something that we've actually got some folks on the team that are heavy gamers that they're the ones that I go to when I want to learn, "Okay, what's the cutting-edge--" >> 'Cause they've already been in it. That's right. >> They're on their Steam, they're doing everything. >> That's right. >> They sort everything out. You leverage a lot of technology in how you really get your message out there. Talk a little about how you think of media these days. >> Oh, it's completely different. I mean, when we're looking at how media is even utilized in these new technologies, you know, our talk show is a talk show that we shoot in Nasdaq Studios, so it's shot in New York City, it's called the "Never Settle Show", it's a weekly one-hour live stream talk show, so we get and appreciate what you have to go through. These guys are pros by the way. (Dave and Stu laugh) Yeah, they're pros 'cause this is not easy to do. >> It's a minor miracle, right? Every time. >> (laughs) It's not easy to do at all. And so a lot of kudos to you and the team behind the scenes that make that happen. >> Thank you. >> With that being said, it's a great time if you have an expertise or if you have content to share especially in a live scenario because now you can start to really utilize other technologies within that. For example, we kind of claim ourselves to be one of the most interactive talk shows out there. What we do in our show is we're using other technologies, bringing them together to create real time conversations. So how that practically plays out is I'll have a guest on the show, we'll be talking, I'll put up a screen of three options and people can vote right then and there while they're watching in stream and you'll see which of what they want me to do next. I'll say something like, "Which thing is most appealing... Which topic do you want us to talk about next?" And they'll actually vote in real time and then the control room in everyone doesn't know what the answer's going to be, but we're all waiting for the answer and then when the popular vote comes out, few seconds later, we scramble and adjust to that. That's real time television, giving viewers what they really want in real time, using different technologies. So that's this hybrid approach. We can be a standard show and just do... talk and have that format, or we could really be looking at things that we could integrate in other technologies that would enhance the viewing experience and make it much more productive. >> Well you're actually affecting the, you call it "creation" as supposed to "disruption" of this new media industry, I mean, you've seen... I saw a stat the other day that cost the New York Times 200 million dollars to run a news desk. (Mario laughs) You're seeing, you know, billionaires buy up, you know, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post-- >> Yes, that's right. >> The industry is transforming in a huge way. You're seeing, you know, Facebook backlash with fake news. What's your senses as to what's going on in the media business? Obviously you're "creating", "disrupting", whatever you like to call it, sure. What do you see is the future of the media business? >> Well, I mean I think it's going to become something where the end reader, the end viewer has more control. Ultimately, that's... the problem with most systems and most structures is when people want to hold the control and not share because whether that's ego, whether they're worried about intellectual property loss, or whether they really think that the market's going to swallow them up.... Now I'm not saying, obviously you give away all your secret sauce, but what I am saying is when you start thinking from that small limiting position, you've already lost the game. And so what I think is going to happen, yes, you have big people buying a lot of media and there's a lot of discussion in politics about whether or not, you know, billionaires buying media are problems and what that's going to mean in terms of the message that's going to be reported to people, that's going to always be an issue, but I think even with that, that's why it's even more empowering that the individuals are taking more control over their own narrative. And that's why I think you've seen social media, Instagram video, Instagram talking about going to sixty minutes in it's video, not just a minute, for publishers, I think the power's now more in the person's hand to really pick and choose and so they vote with their eyeballs, they vote with their engagement, they vote with their interactivity. And so I think no matter what happens on the big end, people are going to be able to create and get the stories that they want to be able to get. >> Well we're big believers of that, Stu, and we're decentralized media and we really believe that there's got to be an incentive system to put the power back in the hands of the users to control their data. >> This is how it works. >> Right? I mean... >> Yeah. And, Mario, so we've talked about the tech and your show "Never Settle" actually won an Emmy for the interactivity nature of it? >> Yeah. It did. >> But talk to the people and passion, how that fits into "Never Settle". >> Yeah, so it's a blending. So what we try to do on our show is blend how you can leverage technology to move forward on your passion. But you can't use technology to move forward on your passion if you don't know what your passion is. So a lot of our discussions really work more around, "how do we get you to think differently"? How do we, you know... our vision for our company is to motivate people across the globe to never settle. How we do that through our mission is that we inspire the humans spirit, we want to teach lessons that matter and we want to uncover new perspectives. What that means, tangibly, is that when you watch our show, you should be having notes. You should be, like... our show is meant for you to want to take notes so that you actually know the process. What people are missing for the most part today is they see how to maybe start something or they see how someone else did and how they succeeded or how they failed, but they don't get the in between, the recipe. And so the more we can be sharing about the process about someone's success or, even better, someone's failure, 'cause that's where you learn more and you get more uncomfortable, makes you more comfortable, it's a blending of those two things of getting your mental position and getting you stronger mentally and building up your resilience so that you can actually go find your purpose, be happier in your life, but then use technology to accelerate. Like, that's the, as Jim put, like, you know, put gasoline and make it fast or make it go quicker. And so I think the blending of the two, again, a hybrid... Even how we approach our content is that. So we'll have everyone from tech luminaries on the show but also we'll just have everyday folks that have really proven success, like these people deserve attention but they're not maybe, quote on quote, big-names. >> And this idea of combinatorial innovation, you certainly heard Jim Heppelmann talking about that today with machines that are powerful and computers that are fast and can do things repetitively and then humans, which are creative. I like that theme. >> You can't do it any other way, I mean, this is why, you know, it's determination and direction. Your team needs to be determined but also have the direction. You need to have what I call the three P's. You need to have your passion in place. Like, what are you ultimately passionate about as a team? As an organization? What are you driving towards? What's your "why"? And then once you have that, then you can start to really push through on the perseverance. You're going to bump your head. You're going to fail fast. A great tech term, I love flipping that tech term because we learn in programming to fail to quick so that we can find the bugs fast and correct our course really quick. So that persistence happens. And then, the hardest part is you got to have some patience. Because then you have to kind of sit back. Let the market also play. Let the universe come around. Sometimes we're ahead. Sometimes we're behind. But we need to have a little bit of that patience to have some reflection to see where we are, so I think, you know, now is really just a great time for a lot of people that are looking to really figure out where they can make their moves... the opportunities that keep creating themselves in IOT are endless. I don't care if you're talking from someone that's a graphic designer all the way up to an engineer or a coder, to marketing and sales, like there's so many different facets of this ecosystem and opportunity now. >> I love that, Mario. Patient, passion, persistence, patience-- >> Yes. >> The three P's kind of start with why, the old-- >> Yeah. Simon Sinek. That's right. >> People don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it. >> That's right. >> Break stuff. >> (laughs) Love that. Break stuff. >> And don't give up. Don't give up. (Mario laughs) >> No, it's, you know... it's because what we're trying to do, if you really wanted to have action, you want to take complex things and you want to pull them together in a hybrid scenario and start to bang upon them. As opposed to the other idea of planning, planning, planning, planning, you actually want to practice, practice, practice, practice. That's what's going to get you there fast. So I just think that with a lot of the technologies it can be overwhelming to people 'cause they start to hear so much so that's why I say it comes back to, "What's your purpose?" If you can stay focused on why you're doing what it is you're doing, you'll know which technologies to pay more attention to. You'll know where your curiosity should veer more into. You'll study the things that you need to really study. And then you'll accelerate faster because you've identified your niche. It's like having a, you know, an Italian restaurant. You're not just, you know... somebody's going to come by and present to you... Some sales rep is going to come by and present to you, like, beer that's not a fit for like Italian restaurant, you know, like, I know that's not for me instantly. As opposed to being pulled in so many directions, which is what the danger of all this technology can do, is it can overwhelm us and pull us into so many directions that we want to go and pursue the hottest new trend or the hot thing. If we come back to our "why", we're always going to be secure. >> That's a great point, I mean there are an infinite opportunities of purposes in this world. >> Yes. >> It's sometimes hard to get a grasp on things and really focus. But you're seeing some of this successful projects really do start with a main spring and a focus and a purpose. >> Yeah. >> And a mission. >> It does. I mean, that's where it all becomes. I mean, it has to start there in order to get other people on board with your dream, whether you're the leader of the organization or the leader of a project. And, you know, I just feel that for many people, they are at an age where they have been in this business for quite some time. They've seen a lot of things evolve. Accepting change and, like Jim had said today, preparing to change is one of the best keys of information that you can take away because we all have the skill, the talent, the ability, it's just a matter or not, are we willing to adjust or are we... do we want to do status quo. >> Awesome. Hey, you're a clear thinker, articulate, you look great. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> (laughs) Aw man, Dave and Stu, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on theCUBE. >> Our pleasure. >> This has been awesome. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back from LiveWorx with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back.