>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios and Palo Alto in Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studio as kind of our on going leadership coverage of what's happening with the COVID crisis, and really looking out into our community to find experts who can provide tips and tricks, and some guidance as everyone is kind of charting these uncharted waters if you will. And we've got a great cube alarm in our database. He's a fantastic resourcer. We're excited to get him on. Share the information with you. We'd like to welcome once again, Darren Murph. He is the Head of Remote for GitLab. Darren, great to see you. >> Absolutely, great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so thank you and. First off, we had you on earlier this year, back when things were normal, in kind of a regular review. Who knew that you would be at the center of the work-from-home universe just a few short months later. I mean, you've been doing this for ever. So it's kind of a wile old veteran of the work-from-home, or not even from home, just work from some place else. What are some top level things that you can share for people that have never experienced this before? >> Yeah, on the working front. If you're one of the people that are working from home, I think there's a couple of things you can do to help acclimate, make your world a little bit better. The first is to try to create some sort of separation between your work life and your personal life. Now if you have a home big enough that you can dedicate a workspace to being your office, that's going to help a lot. Help from a focus standpoint and just. You don't want those lines between work and life to blur too much, that's where isolation kicks in. That's where burnout kicks in. You want to do whatever you can to avoid. You got to remember, when you're not physically walking out of a office and disconnecting from work. You have to replicate that and recreate that. I actually recommend for people that used to have a commute and now they don't. I would actually black something in your calendar, whether that's cooking, cleaning, spending time with your family. Resting more, anything so that you ramp into your day very deliberately and ramp out of very deliberately. Now on the team leading front. I'm going to say it may feel a little counter intuitive, but the further your team is from you, the more distributed they are. The more you really need to let go and allow them to have mechanism for feeding back to you. Managers job in a remote setting switches from just being a pure director, you're actually being an unblocker. A really active listener. And for people who have gotten to a certain point in their career through command and control, this is going to feel very strange, jarring and counter intuitive, but we've seen it time and time again. You need to trust that your workers are in a new environment. You have to give them a mechanism feeding back to you to help them unblock whatever it is. >> You know that's funny, we had someone on as part of this the other day, talking about leaders need to change their objectives that they're managing to, from kind of activity based, to deliverals based. And it actually floored me that someone is still writing in a blog in 2020, that people have to change their management deliverables from activity to deliverables. And it was so funny, you know, you had Martin Mikos on, we had him on too. My favorite comment was, "It's so easy to fake it in the office and look busy, "but when you're at home all you have is your deliverable." so it really, it seems like there's kind of a forcing function to get people to pay attention to the things they should be managing to anyway. >> You said it, forcing functions. I talk about this all the time, but there are so many forcing functions in remote that help you do remote well. But not only just do remote well, just run your business well. Even if you plan on going back to office. On some level there's a lot of things you can do now to help pave the infrastructure to creating a better and more effective team. And as a manager, if you have it in a writing down. The metrics or expectations for your direct reports in the office, now's the time to do it. Subjectivity is allowed to flourish in the office. You can praise or promote people just kind of how much you like them or how easy they are to work with. That really has nothing to do with metrics and results. I've often been asked, "How do you know if "someone's been working remotely?" And my response is, how do you know if they were working in the office. If you can't clearly answer that in the office, then you're not going to be able to answer it remotely. So frankly, in these times a lot of the burden falls more on the manager to actually take a hard look at what they're clarifying to their team. And if the metrics aren't laid out. It's on the manager to lay that out. It's not the responsibility of the direct report to figure out how to prove their worth. The manager has to be very articulant about what that value looks like. >> Right, and not only do they have to be articulate about what the deliverables are and what their expectations are, but. You guys have a remote play book GitLab has published, which is terrific. People should go online, it's 38 pages of dense, dense, dense material. It's a terrific resource, it's a open source, you got to love the open source, eat those. But one of the slides that jumped out to me, and it's consistent with a lot of these conversations that we're having, is that your frequency of communications when people are not in the same room together. Has to go up dramatically, which is a little counter intuitive, but what I found even more interesting was the variety of types of communication. Not just you kind of standard meeting, or you standard status on a project, or maybe a little bit of a look forward to some strategic stuff. But you outlined a whole variety of types of communication. Objectives or methods, or feel if you will, to help people stay connected and to help kind keep this team building going forward. >> So here's the thing about communication. You've got to be intentional about it in a remote setting. And in fact, you need to have more intentionality across the board in a remote setting. And communications is just a very obvious. So for a lot of companies, they leave a lot of things to spontaneity Inter-personal relationships and communications are two of the biggest ones. Where you may not actually lay out a plan for how work is communicated about, or what opportunities you give people to chat about their weekends, or sports, or anything like that. You just kind of put them in the same building and then people just kind of figure it out. In a remote setting that's unwise. You're going to get a lot of chaos and disfunction when people don't know how to communicate and on what channel. So at GitLab we're very prescriptive that work communication happens in a GitLab issue or a merge request. And then informal communication happens through Zoom calls or Slack. We actually expired our Slack messages after 90 days, specifically to force people not to do work in Slack. We want the work to begin where it needs to end up, and in that case it's a very, it's a tool, GitLab, that's built for asynchronous communication. We want to continue to encourage that bias towards asynchronous communication. So yeah, we write down everything about how we want people to communicate and through what channels. And that may sound like a lot of rules, but actually it's very much appreciated by our global team. We have over 1200 people, in more that 65 countries. And they all just need to know where communication is going to happen. And our team is really cohesive and on the same page because we're articulant about that. >> So I want to double down on that. On 'A secret is peace', 'cause you brought this up, or you and Stu brought it up in your conversation with Stu, and Stu raised an interesting point, right. Unfortunately in the day of email and connected phones, and this and that, there has grown an expectation that used to be business, okay was, "I'll get back to you within 24 hours "if you leave me a voicemail." And lord knows what it was when we were still typing letters and memos, and sticking stuff in the yellow envelop with the string, right, as multiple days. But somehow that all got changed to, "I need to hear back form you now." And often it feels like, if your trying to have just some uninterrupted work time, to get something done. It's like, why is your lack of planning suddenly my emergency. And you talked about, you can't operate that on a global, asynchronous team because everyone's in different timezones. And just by rule, there are going to be a lot of people that are not awake when you need the answer to that question. But that you've developed a culture that that's okay, and that that is kind of the flow and the pacing which A, forces people to ask in advance, not immediately when you need it. But also gives people unfettered time to actually plan to do work versus plan to answer communications. I wonder if you can dig into how did that evolve and how do you enforce that when somebody comes in from the outside world. >> The real key to that is something that might not be immediately apparent to everyone. Which is, at GitLab we try to shift as much burden as we possibly can humans to documentation. And this even starts at onboarding, where to get onboarded at GitLab, you get an onboarding issue within GitLab, with over 200 check boxes of things to read and knowledge assessments to take. And humans are a part of it, but very minimal compared to what most companies would do. And the thing that you just outlined was, we're talking about asking questions. Or tapping someone on the shoulder to fill in a knowledge gap. But at GitLab we want to write everything down in a very formalized structured way. We try to work handbook first. So we need to document all of our processes, protocols and solutions. Basically everything that we've ever seen or done, needs to be documented in the handbook. So it's not that GitLab team members just magically need less information, it's just that instead of having to ask someone on our team, we go ask the handbook. We go consult the documentation. And the more rich that your documentation is, the less you have to bother other people, and the less you need to rely on synchronicity. So for us it all starts with operating handbook first. That allows our humans to reserve their cycles for doing truly creative things, not just answering your question for the thousandth time. >> Right, another thing you covered, which I really enjoyed was getting senior executives to work from home for an extended period of time. Now obviously, before COVID that would probably be a lot harder to do. Well now COVID has forced that. And I think to your point about that is, it really forces the empathy for someone who had no interest in working from home. Didn't like to work from home. Loves going to the office, has their routine. Been doing it for decades, to kind of wake up to A, you need to have more empathy for what this is all about. And B, what's it all about by actually doing it. So I wonder, kind of your take in the movement to more of a work from anywhere future. Now that all the senior executives have been thrown into this work from home situation. >> Look Jeff, you never want to waste a crisis. We can't wish away the crisis that's in front of us, but we can choose how we respond to it. And this does present an opportunity to lay ground work, to lay infrastructure, to build a more remote organization. And I have absolutely advocated for companies to get their leadership teams out of the office for a meaningful amount of time. A month, ideally a quarter. So that they actually understand what the remote life is. They actually have some of those communication gaps and challenges so they can document what's happening. And then help fix it. But to your point, executives love going to the office because they're on a different playing field to begin with. They usually have an executive assistant. Things are just. There's less friction in general. So it behooves them to just kind of keep charging in that direction, but now what we have is a situation where all of those executives are remote. And I'm seeing a lot of them say, "You know what, I'm seeing the myths that I've perpetrated "break down in front of me." And this is even in the most suboptimal time ever to go remote. This isn't remote work, this is crisis induced work from home. We're all dealing with social isolation. Our parents are also doubling as homeschool teachers. We have a lot going on. And even on top of all of that, I'm amazed at how adaptable the human society has been. In just adjusting to this and figuring it out on the fly. And I think the companies that take this opportunity, to ask themselves the right question, and build this into their ongoing talent and operational strategy, will actually come out stronger on the other side. >> Yeah, as you said. This is as challenging as it's ever been. There was no planning ahead, you're spouse or significant other's also working from home. And has the same Zoom schedule as you do, for some strange reason, right. The kids are home as you said, and your homeschooling them. And they also have to get on Zoom to do their classes. So it's really suboptimal. But as you said, it's a forcing function and people are going to learn. One of the other things in your handbook is the kind of definitions. It's not just work from home or work at the office, but there's actually a continuum and a spectrum. And as people are doing this for weeks and months. And behaviors turn into habits. People are not going to want to go back to sitting on 101 for two hours every morning to go work on a laptop in the office. It just doesn't make sense. So as you kind of look forward. How do you see the evolution. How are people taking baby steps, if you will. To incorporate more of this learning as we go forward. And incorporate into more of their regular, everyday procedures. >> I'm really optimistic about the future because what I see happening here is people are unlocking their imaginations. So once they've kind of stabilized, they're starting to realize, "Hey, I'm getting a lot more time with my family. "I'm spending a lot less on gas. "I just feel better as a person because I don't show up "to work everyday with road rage. "So how can I keep this going." And I genuinely think what's going to happen in four or five months, we're going to have millions of people collectively look at each other and they say, "The boss just called me back into the office "but I just did my job from home. "Even in suboptimal conditions. "I saw my family more, I exercised more. "I had more time to cook and clean. "How about no, I'm not going to go back to the office "as my default location." And I think what's going to happen is the 80, 20 rule is going to flip. Right now people work from home only for a special occasion, like the cable company's coming or something like that. Going forward it think the offices are going to be the special occasion. You're only going to commute to the office, or fly to the office when you have a large contingent of people coming in and you need to wine and dine them, or something like that. And the second order of this is, people that are only living in expensive cities because of their location. When their lease comes up for renewal, they're going to cast a glance at places like Wyoming and Idaho, and Ohio. Maybe even Vietnam and Cambodia, or foreign places. Because now you have them thinking of, "What could life look like if I decouple geography at work. "I still want to work really hard "and contribute this knowledge. "But I can go to a place with better air quality, "better schools, better opportunity to actually "invest in a smaller community, "where I can see real impact." And I think that's just going to have massive, massive societal impacts. People are really taking this time to consider how tightly their identity has been woven into work. Now that they're home and they've become something more than just whatever the office life has defined them as. I think that's really healthy. I think a lot of people may have intertwined those two things too tightly in the past. And now it's a forcing function to really ask yourself, you aren't just your work, you're more than your work. And what can that look like when you can do that job from anywhere. >> Right, right. And as you said, there's so many kind of secondary benefits in terms of traffic and infrastructure, and the environment and all kinds of things. And the other thing I think that's interesting what you said, 80, 20 I think that was pretty generous. I wouldn't give it a 20 percent. But if people, even in this hybrid steps, do more once a week, twice a week. Once every two weeks, right. The impact on the infrastructure and peoples lives is going to be huge. But I wanted to drill on something as we go into kind of this hybrid mode at some point in time. And you talked about, and I thought it was fascinating, about the norms and really coming out from a work from home first, or a work from anywhere first. Your very good at specifying anywhere doesn't mean home. Could be the library, could be the coffee shop. Could be an office, could be a WeWork. Could be wherever. Because if you talked about the new norms and the one I thought was really interesting, which probably impacts a lot of teams, is when some of the team's in the office and some of the team isn't. The typical move, right, is to have everyone in the office go into the conference room. We sit around one big screen. So you get like five people sitting around one table and you got a bunch of heads on Zoom. And you said, "You know, no. "Let's all be remote. So if we just be happen to be sitting at our desk. If we happen to be in the office, that's okay. But really normalize. And like we saw the movement from Cloud got to Cloud-e to Cloud first, why not Cloud. And then you know, kind of mobile and does it work in a mobile. No, no, no it has to. It's mobile first. Really the shift to not, can it be done at home, but tell me why it shouldn't be done at home, a really different kind of opening position as to how people deploy resources and think about staffing and assigning teams. It's like turning the whole thing upside down. >> Completely upside down. I think remote first to your point, is going to be the default going forward. I think we're just one or two quarters away from major CEO's sitting on the hot seat on CNBC, when it's their turn for quarterly earnings. And they're going to have to justify why they're spending what they spend on real estate. Is if your spending a billion dollars a year on real estate, you could easily deploy that to more people, more R&D. Once that question is asked in mass, that is when you're going to see the next phase of this. Where you really have to justify, even from a cost stand point, why are you spending so much? Why are you tying so much of your business results to geography. The thing about remote first is that it's not a us versus them. A lot of what we've learned at GitLab, and how we operate so efficiently. They work really well for remote teams, and they are remote first. But they would work just as well in an office. We attach a Google doc agenda to every single business meeting that we have, so that there's always an artifact. There's always a documented thread on what happened in a meeting. Now this would work just as well in a co-located meeting. Who wouldn't want to have a meeting where it's not just in one ear and out the other. You're going to give the time to the meeting, you might as well get something out of it. And so a lot of these remote forced. Remote first forcing functions, they do help remote teams work well. But I think it's especially important for hybrid teams. Offices aren't going to vanish overnight. A lot of these companies are going to have some part of their company return to the office, when travel restrictions are lifted. It think the key here is that its going to be a lot more fluent. You're never going to know on a day to day basis, who is coming into the office, and who is not. So you need to optimize for everyone being out of the office. And if they just so happen to be there, they just so happen to be there. >> Right, right. So before we. I want to get into one little nitty gritty subject, in terms of investment into the home office. You know, we're doing 100% remote interviews now on theCUBE, we used to go to pretty much. Probably 80% of our business was at events, or at peoples offices, or facilities. Now it's all dial-in. You talked a lot about people need to flex a little bit on enabling people to invest in the little bits and pieces of infrastructure for their home office, that they just don't have the same set ups. You're talking about multiple monitors, a comfortable chair, a good light. That there's a few things you can invest in, not tremendous amounts of money. But a couple of hundred bucks here and there, to make a big difference on the home work environment. And how people should think about making that investment into a big monitor that they don't see. It's not sitting at the desk in the office. >> 100%, look if you're coming from a co-located space, you're probably sitting in a cube that costs five, 10, maybe 20 thousand dollars put together. You might not notice that, but it's not cheap to build cubicles in a high rise. And if you go to your home and you have nothing set up, I would say it's on the people group to think really hard about being more lax and more lenient about spending policy. People need multiple monitors. You need a decent webcam, you need a decent microphone. You need a chair that isn't going to kill your back. You want to help people create healthy ergonomics. Sustainable workspaces in their home. This is the kind of thing that will inevitably impact productivity. You force someone to just be hunched over on their couch, in front of a 13 inch laptop. I mean, what kind of productivity do you really expect from that. That's not a great long term solution. I think the people group actually has a higher burden to bare all the way around. You know when it comes to making sure teams feel like teams and they have the atmosphere to connect on a meaningful level. It comes down to the people group, to not letting that just go to spontaneity. You want to have a happy hour virtually, you're going to have to put a calendar invite on peoples calendar. You're going to create topical channels in Slack for people to talk about things other than work. Someone's going to have to do that. They don't just happen by default. So, from hardware all the way to communication. The people group really needs to use this opportunity to think about, "Okay, what can we unlock in this new world." >> Right, I'm glad you said the people group and not the resources group because they're not coal, or steel, or a factory. >> No, if anything COVID has humanized this in a way, and I think it's actually a really big silver lining, where we're all now peering into each others homes. And it is glaringly obvious, that we're all humans first, colleagues second. And of course that always been the case, but there's something about a sterile or co-located work environment. You check a piece of you at the door. And you just kind of get down to business. Why is that, we have technology at out fingertips. We can be humans with each other. And that going to actually encourage more empathy. As we've seen at GitLab, more empathy leads to better business results. It leads to more meaningful connections. I mean, I have people, friends, located all over the world that I feel like I have a closer bond with. A closer, more intimate connection with that a lot of people I've met in office. To some degree you don't know who they really are. You don't know what they really love and what makes them tick. >> Right, right. All right Darren, so before I let you go and again thank you for the time, the conversation. I'm sure everyone is calling you up and I just love the open source ETHOS and the sharing. It's made such a huge impact on the technology world and second order impacts that a lot of people take advantage. Again, give us the place that people can go for the playbook, so they can come and leverage some of the resources. And again, thank you guys for publishing 'em. >> Absolutely, so we're an open source. We try to open source all of our learnings on remote. So go to allremote.info that will redirect you right into the All Remote section of GitLab handbook. All of which is open source. Right at the top you can download the remote playbook, which is PDF that we talked about. Download that, it takes you through all of our best information on getting started and thriving as a remote team. Just under that there's a lot of comprehensive guides on how we think about everything. And how we operate synchronously. How we handle meeting, and even hiring and compensation. allremote.info and of course you're welcome to reach out to me on Twitter, I'm @darrenmurph. >> All right, well thanks a lot Darren. And I find it somewhat ironic that you have a jetliner over your shoulder. Waiting for the lockdown and the quarantine to end so you can get back on the airplane. And we're looking forward to that day. >> Can't wait man, I miss, I miss the airplanes. I told someone the other day, I never thought I'd say I miss having a middle seat at the very back of the airplane, with someone reclined into my nose. But honestly, I can't wait. Take me anywhere. >> I think you'll be fighting people for that seat in another month or so. All right, thanks a lot, Darren. >> Absolutely, take care all. >> All right, he's Darren. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, from our Palo Altos Studios. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering. Get lab commit 2020 Brought to you by get lab. >>I am stupid, man, and this is the Cubes coverage of Get Lab. Commit 2020 here in San Francisco. Still hard saying 2020 and not thinking we're in the future. Joining us first time on the program. Darren Murph, who's the head of remote at get lab and a little birdie, told me that he also has a Guinness Book of World record. So, >>Darren, before we get >>into your day job, bring us back, is it? It's, uh, it's an interesting thing. >>Yeah, it's true. Surreal to have their records. So I'm the world's most prolific professional blogger, which is kind of crazy of Britain. About 10 million words or so When the record was given, it was about 17,000 articles, which was an article published every two hours, 24 7 for four straight years, which actually makes my chest hurt just a bit saying that out loud. >>But Darrin, I'm going thio going to do the Turing test right now >>because I'm not sure you're human being. I have been a blogger. When I had my regular cadence of 2 to 3 articles a week and knew the you know, 10 p.m. When the kids were in bed when I would do that stuff. The amount of words you're saying, um, you know that does not compute with me, but amazing stuff. Congratulations on. And you still you don't keep up that pace >>anymore. Try actually, part of >>my job here, get Lab is to make the all remote section of our handbook a lot bigger and better than it. ISS. So I'm still cranking away very different capacity than covering consumer electronics, but still cranking. Yeah, all right. >>Remote? Yes. Really interesting topic. When we talk about the future of work, you talk about the gig economy. There's all these ways that, you know, how do we leverage and enable global and changing workforce? And it's really fascinating. Get lab over 1100 employees and completely remote keynote this morning talked about, you know, the woman in New Zealand that's completely cut off with everything except for the Internet. She does her own power and everything like that, but she could just be part of the team and you don't even know. So tell us a little bit. What does that mean? Head of remote for your >>old. So as we've grown, it's It's interesting. There's an intersection of hiring and recruiting, talent branding, but also process. So we have a lot of people joining the company that come from co located spaces. And there's a certain acclamation period to getting used to remote and doing remote. Well, you think about people that have joined a co located company. They walk into an office where they've had a professional design, their office space. So they have ergonomic chairs, ergonomic monitors. Everything is set up for them. But if you're working from home or working for some wires from somewhere outside of an office, now that's on. You did. How do you do meetings? Well, how do you do? A synchronous Well, so part of my role is to work through those processes to make sure everyone, when they're on board and get lab, is giving the best possible experience. If they're coming into a remote role for the first time, >>you do you have any bias towards it makes sense to just build it in my home. Is it good to go to Oh, You know, I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and there's this cool place where I can go where they have good coffee and the people I can hang out with everything in between. What are some of the best >>practices there? The beauty of all remote is we don't say you have to work from home. You can work from anywhere. So wherever you're most comfortable, maybe that's a co working space. Maybe that's at a friend's house. Maybe that's a different place. Every month we have people that travel all around the world and every month or in a different time zone. That's the beauty of it. So we have over 1100 employees, but none of them operate their days quite the same as anyone else, and that that's the beauty of a super diverse and inclusive team. And, well, actually reimburse co working space expensing expenses. If you just feel more comfortable working in a group or you need to leave your home for any reason. Okay, >>um, we talked to sit a little bit about, you know, does this remote work for every type of job? His feedback from the light Combinator people were like, If you're in finance, It might not be the best fit on dhe one. Understand? How does the software help does it if if I'm someone that's doing development, you know, doesn't poke me every once in a while and say, Hey, you know, maybe you should eat and sleep every once in a while And you know, you've been going at this a little long time, you know? How does both the kind of the kind of HR and the technology piece fit together? >>Well, we hire people that are managers of one, so having a high degree of autonomy is really important. So you need to have a lot of self awareness in managing your day, and that includes taking breaks. And so we encourage people to take vacation, take breaks whenever they need it, and again everyone is different. So we enable people to take that as they need that. But no doubt when you're hiring, you want to look for things like that. It helps to have some experience in the working world, definitely with interns in junior level level level people, you need to check in with them more often because managing their own time and themselves when you're not in an office setting can feel a bit far, but actually get lab. The product is tailor made for remote teams because it's built by remote and even on the marketing side of things where no code really is involved. We use it to manage entire projects and entire events. And the beauty of that is it hones in on documentation, which is essential to do remote. Well, so we say any part of a project that you're moving forward try to move that forward and add context in a way that someone else who may be asleep right now when they wake up and read your stuff along the way they have context of what you did and can pick it up from there and move it on to the next step so that that helps us work really well, remotely. But honestly, that is probably useful for co located teams as well. And so a lot of people look at us as all you know, you have this all remote team. Things must be drastically different, but the truth is, all remote forces you to do things that you should be doing anyway. Transparency, documentation iteration. We just have to do them much more quickly and much more intentionally. >>Yeah, when everybody gets together event like this, Are they okay being on the same room, or do they want to go documents and things and hand things off? >>The funny thing about that is people will often say I don't know if I could I could work well in a remote environment because I really love the energy of being with other people. And the truth is in person, interactions are vital to a remote company. We have to be really intentional about that as well. So we get a CZ many people, as we can together for things like get lab, commit and get lab, contribute where we invite the entire company. But the subtle differences when you're in a co located space and you see people on a daily basis, sometimes you can take for granted in person interactions you have because you think I'll just see them again and again and again, but never in a remote setting. When you have to be intentional about when you'll see a person, it's it's there's a certain level of energy and, um, you proactively look forward to moments like that because you don't get them is often. So we build a lot of great bonds and relationships around those key in person moments. >>Is there anything along the communication technologies that you recommend you use video conference thing or, you know, phone calls? Or you know what some of the recommended How do I make sure you get, you know, some high bandwith interacting? >>There's a few tools that we use that didn't exist not too long ago, but because they exist now they've made all remote as a concept far more approachable and feasible. Google Docks is a big one. We cover agendas and things like that and something that could be edited by multiple people at once. Zuma's another one. Zoom is really amazing for video communication because many, many dozens of people hundreds of people, could be on the same call. And with very little technical difficulty, everyone can communicate well, which has been amazing for us being able to see each other on connect on a meaningful in a meaningful way, and the last one is actually get lab the product. So we build our handbooks. We have over 3000 pages of publicly accessible Get Live Handbook, How We Do Everything that is All publicly available on the Web and built and edited by Get Lab the product. So as we use get lab product to edit and iterated on their handbook, we as a get lab team see things that could be done better, more efficiently, and that gives us a flywheel of making the product better and then making the handbook better. So, >>Darren, I'm just curious where there any kind of interesting findings that you've had, uh, going to a company this size now with everything remote that you know, surprises >>the team. Well, I've worked remotely my entire career in different stages of remote. So some of the companies have been about 50 50 and some have been most of the people in the office. And then I've been one of maybe 10% of the company that works. Outside of it, you see all different facets of how people and companies communicate when you're in a hybrid remote setting. But the beautiful thing about all remote is it truly makes everyone a first class citizen. So a lot of people will say in a hybrid setting. If I don't go to the office frequently enough, miss out on some things. Or maybe I miss out on praise or promotion opportunities. Things like that. You feel like a second class citizen. So in, in in, in an environment like that, you have to take certain approaches to include people. You have to think about it intentionally to include those remote individuals, whereas if it's all remote, you're all on a level playing field. I think the other interesting thing is we have an amazingly diverse team over 65 countries because we hire the world's best talent from wherever they are. And so you'll be talking with someone on a call and you'll just see what's in their background. You think that looks completely foreign to where I am, and it's an amazing way to engage with someone and learn about them, learn about a new culture and truly keep a more global perspective. And lastly, all remote enables a workforce that may have been rejected at other stages of the workforce. So things like caregivers or working parents or military spouses where their spouse has to move at each new deployment. Ah, lot of these people might say, You know, it's too complicated to continue to reinvent my career with every move along the way in an all remote setting. Your job goes with you as those changes in life happened. And I just think that's going to become more than Norm, where the notion of moving for a career will seem silly, like the career should just follow you, no matter where life takes you. >>Yeah, I guess that lets follow upon that is we've reached a point where people expect, you know, immediate response. It's a text. It's something like that. When I'm dealing with dispersed and remote, how do you make How do you is that something you deal with? Is it something that is a team monitoring and handling that? But how do I make sure that I'm a little? I would I think, that it has to be a little bit more forgiving of not being an instant response. >>I tell you, all remote is actually much better for your mental health insanity than other settings, and it's because it forces us to work a synchronously. There's no other way to do it. We have people spread or call 65 countries, so almost every time zone is covered. But that also means there's almost a guarantee that someone on your team isn't a vastly different times, so they may be asleep the entire time. Europe working. We also allow people to just structure their day day today differently, depending on what they have going on appointments, things they need to attend to with their Children, things like that. So within a single as mindset, it enables all of us to take a step back and just assume that whatever we're doing is done with no one else online, so it can removes the burden of this nonstop string of slag messages where you have to respond to things immediately within a given time frame. We don't operate in that construct. I'll tell you, just from a mental health standpoint, when you have an entire company that embraces that were all given a little more breathing room to do really good. Deep work requires long periods of uninterrupted time, and we've seen massive improvements on the product and just team morale. When we embrace that and I feel like as a whole as a society, we're getting close to a tipping point where people are just to their limit on how many more slack messages or e mails or pings or urgent, urgent, urgent things they could do while also doing their job well. So we may be a little bit ahead of the curve on that. But my hope is that the industry at large embraces that allows the people more time to actually do the work they were hired. >>Darren Murph love the idea. Hope it definitely spreads beyond. Everybody absolutely can use the breathing room and being able to focus because we we know that multitasking really is a myth when it comes down to it. So great to be able to chat with you in person and thank you for all the >>work you're doing. A remote. Thanks for having me here. I appreciate it. All right, check out the cube dot net for all of our coverage, whether you were at an event or watching remote or after it, >>we've got all the content for you to meet him in. Thank you for watching the Cube

>> 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.

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

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with though leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back all ready, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios we're still getting through the COVID crisis. I think we're in week 12. I don't know, I can't even keep track anymore. But again, as part of this process, we're reaching out to our community, going out to the leaders of the community to really get some best practices, get some insight, and I hear from people that are out in the community and helping other companies as well as their own company, kind of get through these crazy times. So we're really excited to have in a brand new role, never been on the key before, Saleem Janmohamed. He is the senior managing director and market unit lead of the U.S West he just took over from John Del Santo, who we met when you guys opened the new salesforce location. So Saleem, great to meet you. >> Hi, Jeff, great to meet you. Thank you for having me. >> Absolutely. >> Glad to be here. Excited for being in this new role. >> So, it's a new role for you, but you've been at a center for, I think for 30 some odd years so, give us a little bit of history. How did, where did you get started? And obviously you must like the culture. You must like the opportunity to stick with it this long. >> Yeah, I am, 30 years in one company is definitely an anomaly here in the Bay area. I started actually in Toronto in financial services, I have an undergraduate degree in business and computer science and then an MBA. I was attracted to Accenture or Anderson Consulting at the time because it was a combination of business and technology. And frankly, the ability to travel the world, just from a personal perspective, I was born in Kenya of Indian parents. I grew up in the UK, I went to school in Canada and now I'm a U.S citizen. So, when someone asks me, where are you from? My usual answer is, how much time do you have? (laughs) But I've got the opportunity through Accenture to work all around the world with some amazing clients, doing incredible things. So, I'm excited about this opportunity to work with some of the leading clients in the world. >> Right? And for people that are familiar with this Accenture, you guys are kind of a matrix organization. So, in terms of the vertical specialty, you've been in the called the CMT, the Communications Media and Technology. So what's been kind of your focus from that point of view? >> Absolutely, so I spent about, as I said, 30 years with Accenture, about 20 of those years were with a wireline wireless and satellite communications companies where I was helping to essentially build out the network infrastructure, the billing and customer care infrastructure. For both large existing telcos, as well as emerging telcos or next-gen telcos, for example, in the wireless space. In markets like India and the middle East, which were emerging markets for us, and for the wireless business. The last 10 years I've spent in the software and platforms part of our business. which is really serving our high-tech client base, as well as our internet and social plant based mostly here on the West Coast. And so it's been, CMT is one of our five industry verticals. The others are products, resources, health and public sector, and financial services. So, we have gone to market traditionally, as those industry led PNS just in the last few months, we actually, right before the Pandemic, I shifted to a new operating model, which is very geography focused. We still preserved our core industry argument. But we're now concentrating in specific markets with a real focus to get all of our services, deployed into those markets and focused on the unique needs of each market. So, it's nothing like moving to a new operating model and having to deal with a pandemic, two weeks into it. It certainly tests your leadership argument as well as your leadership team. >> Right, well, at least you're not in it by yourself. And, it's interesting from your mobile background, you got to see some significant transformation driven by the mobile, especially as you said in more rural markets that were underserved by traditional wire, telephones, but wireless completely changed the game. COVID is this new kind of digital transformation opportunity. We've talked about it a lot over the last several weeks, and it was kind of this light switch moment. You didn't really have a lot of time to plan or, any plans you had were probably laid out very organized, Gantt chart way over a long, long period of time. Then suddenly it was like, boom, you can't go to work. Everybody needs to work from home. So, I'm just curious to get your perspective as you look at, say, the telco transformation and some of these other transformations that didn't have the, either the benefit or the liability, I guess, depending on how you want to define it, of kind of this forcing function that's ready, set go now, you don't really get to think about it or have a choice anymore. >> No, absolutely, look, I'll tell you the COVID crisis, never been a time in  human history, when 2 billion people virtually overnight had to change their behavior And I think that's what we've seen here from an enterprise perspective. The transformation required or the capability required to actually work, have tens of thousands sometimes hundreds of thousands of employees working from home is an arduous task. If you think about Accenture, I mean, we've been a virtual organization throughout our history, We don't really have a headquarters. Our leadership team is distributed all over the world, and a lot of our workforce is actually mobile. So, early on we invested in remote infrastructure, Cloud technologies, really allowing our people to work on client sites at home, in our offices around the world, and to be able to collaborate and communicate, in that fashion. But for those organizations that haven't invested in that kind of infrastructure, COVID has really actually created a greater separation of between the leaders and the laggards. The top 10% of digital transformers have actually expanded that gap and they've created lasting value for their shareholders through that infrastructure investment that they've made. And I think about sort of today's clients that we have here, whether it's on the West Coast or around the world, at this point we've seen more digital transformation happened in the last three months, than we have seen in the last 10 years. It is on the agenda for our key clients and their boards with respect to how they create resiliency, both in their infrastructure and their business operations. So we're particularly focused on helping clients through that transformation, and closing that gap between the leaders and laggards. >> That's terrific, and I'm wondering what you could share, cause we always talk about kind of the three headed monster, right? It's it's technology, which is certainly part of it, but it's also people and process. And clearly to be able to efficiently manage a workforce of 500,000+ people I think are at essentially these days distributed all over the world, many languages, many times zones, many kind of expertises, what are some of those things along those three paths that you share in terms of best practices between the technology and the people and the process? >> Absolutely, so from it, I think, technology is the underlying foundation at this point, if you don't have the remote working infrastructure and the Cloud capability, your data and your systems accessible, to a remote workforce you're already behind. So, step one is getting the basic foundation of the fundamentals in place through that remote infrastructure as well as Cloud technologies. From a process standpoint, what we're seeing clients do today is actually rethink all their processes. If COVID has taught us one thing. I mean, three months ago, if you had asked most of the executives that we talked to, can you actually run your company remotely, most would have answered no. (Jeff laughs) Today, what we've proven over the last three months is in fact that's possible. But you really now need to create lasting change in the process, to be able to sort of sustain the value. We're finding that people are more efficient, quality's better, engagement is better, with remote working, but in order to be able to create enduring change, you're going to need to actually change and rationalize processes across the organization from selling to customer care, to marketing and to operations, and even some cases manufacturing. And that requires a cultural change as well. For organizations that haven't, aren't used to sort of virtual working, it requires an engagement model change, and really sort of bringing together a hybrid between, physical interaction and digital interaction. One of the things we're doing actually along those lines, our team is Zurich cause that pioneered this technology we're calling synapse, which allows you to go from sort of, this kind of interaction to actually augmented reality and virtual reality environments where you connect collaborate with each other in an entirely virtual world that actually replicates the real world. So, we've taken our San Francisco Hub and various other Hub locations around the world, replicated them instead of 3D space, and how people do interact with each other, in a more human way in a virtual space. So, I think what you're going to see is more of those kinds of technologies, creeping into the way people actually interact with each other as the new normal. >> Right, so, for the people that weren't prepared, right? That hadn't already kind of moved down the road in terms of SaaS applications and distributed workforce and security and all those things to bake in, did they just have to go now or are they still stuck, kind of holding their head in the sand, waiting for this thing to end. I mean, is there a way for someone to, how do they quickly make that transformation with no planning? It's one thing if you're already kind of on your way, and you just, you give it a little bit more gas, but for the people that really weren't thinking that way, do they even have a chance or it's like, sorry, you better, (laughs) you're late to the party. >> I think today, even with a standing start today, if you look at the technologies available from Microsoft, from Google, from Amazon, a lot of the big public Cloud providers, you can really get up to speed very quickly. For example, we took the National Health Service in the UK, using teams we put them online almost within a week to get them activated in a virtual environment, interacting and operating their service without having interest invested in that technology in the past so, even as an organization that hasn't done, that you can move quickly leveraging the investments in infrastructure that service providers have made over the years. >> Jeff: Right. >> I think that it requires though a leadership change. The c-suite and the board of our clients really need to see that strategic imperative of making that change in order to be able to facilitate the change through the organization. And I can tell you that, our clients are absolutely committed to that journey at this point, and are actively looking for opportunities to implement digital technology throughout every function in their organization, so that they can actually, handle these kinds of extraneous shocks to their business. >> Right. >> And if you think about sort of the three areas of focus these days, it's about, getting people to work or getting back to the office wherever possible, and doing that with a focus on keeping their people safe, and within sort of the regulatory environment that they operate. But secondly, it's about putting in place these kinds of digital technologies that allow sort of ongoing hybrid digital and physical workspaces, and also creating a different type of customer experience from selling to operations for their customer base. And then the last is actually thinking about a dramatic change in cost infrastructure through outsourcing that also creates the ability to variabilize your cost in the event of further extraneous shocks, because we don't know how long this is going to last. We don't know what the next wave might look like. So you really need to think about putting in place the infrastructure and the changes that allows you to endure both from a cost as well as a process and technology perspective, these changes in the future. >> Yeah, I want to dig into a little bit about kind of what comes next because we're into this for a while. I think it's going to keep going for a while. There's indications that we might be hitting into a second wave and in my mind, short of a vaccine we're going to be an in kind of an uncomfortable state for awhile. But I'm just curious as to how you're hearing people thinking about what going back means. Cause I, you know, I have a hard time thinking that if people have been working from home for months, right, and behaviors become habits and, people learn how to be productive and, they like to be able to eat dinner with the family. I just don't know, or what do you think in terms of kind of rushing back to jumping on the 101 every day at 7:00 to sit in traffic for two hours. I just, it seems like hopefully we're past that in a need to have knowledge workers be at an office all together at the same time every day, especially now that they've learned to be productive, kind of outside of that routine. What are some of the things that people are thinking about? How should they be thinking about it? And of course there's the whole liability issue where, you invite people back somebody gets sick. I mean, we've barely kind of begun to hear the whole lawyer piece of the story, which we don't necessarily >> No. >> need to get into. >> I mean, I think the first thing is absolutely making sure that people are safe. And I think most organizations are thinking through, how to put in place the controls and the processes to ensure that their people are safe and most are thinking about this in a very phased way. You're hearing a lot of our Bay area clients announcing that they're not returning back to work this year. And, several are saying, perhaps even never. And so I think that, there is a fundamental change happening here with respect to going back to the office. Our sense is that there's going to be a much more hybrid environment where, it's going to be perfectly fine for folks to be working from home two or three days a week, and then going to the office where it's necessary to collaborate in a physical way. And also a human way, I think that, we do need as humans that interaction, a physical interaction. And so I think, we may be physically apart, but we need to be socially interactive. And I think organizations are trying to figure out sort of the right blend there. But I don't think we go back to a normal, if you will the old normal, which was five days a week in the office, I do think that we're going to be in a much more virtual environment. And frankly, there are some benefits of that in that, if you look at our organization because we're so global, we're able to tap into talent all around the world that can help our clients here in the Bay area, because they're more comfortable now, with the use of virtual technology. So I do think that the new normal will be a hybrid environment, much more so than it has in the past. >> Yeah, we talked to, I don't know if you know, Darren Murph, GitLab, they're really interesting company. They've been 100% remote from forever. So they've got a lot of really defined practices and processes in place in terms of like, which communication channel is for what types of communication and Darren's point was because they are mobile and they are in different time zones, you have to be much more defined and thoughtful in the way that you organize your communications so that people can be more self serve. And that those things will also work great in a physical world you just didn't have to have in the physical world. And his point is, we can just throw people in a room and hope that they get together, that doesn't necessarily always happen. And so by using some of these remote management techniques and processes you're actually going to be much more effective whether you're together in a room and can go out to lunch together, or you're still distributed team. And really kind of, as we've seen this transition from kind of do we want to put it in Cloud, to why don't we want to put it in the Cloud, to kind of a Cloud first and then on kind of a mobile, where your history is, should it be a mobile app, or should it be mobile first? It almost feels like now it's going to be remote first. And then if there's a reason to come to the office, it's an important meeting we need to get together. People are coming from out of town, but it almost feels like it's going to shift that remote's going to be the primary form. And then the physical getting together really be secondary. I don't know if you are hearing anything along those lines. >> No, absloutely, we've seen that in our own environment. I think the level of engagement between our leadership teams here in the West and all around the world and in the market units is actually significantly greater. It's not that you run into someone in the hallway with especially in a very large organization like ours, you are now actually connecting face to face with people. The days of the conference call are gone, and you're actually interacting and you're peering into the lives and the homes of the colleagues that you've worked with for many years. I think that's actually a pretty fundamental social change, and actually creates a level of proximity that perhaps you didn't even see when you were together in an office somewhere, and you're appearing into the lives, if you will, of your counterparts. I think that's a pretty fundamental change. And, if I look at the forms of engagement, I mean, we have, most of our population is under 30 around the world. And so they're used to a digital channels of communication, both on the mobile handset, as well as on their laptops and desktops, through online channels. And so, we're actually leveraging that to be much more connected, even in this virtual world than we were in our physical world. >> Jeff: Right. >> And I think most organizations see that as an avenue to really get a pulse on what's happening with their workforce and in their business, especially in a global setting. >> Right, and I wonder if you could share some best practices on kind of from a leadership perspective, cause you're part of Julie's executive team. I'm sure you guys are distributed all over the world and I assume your direct reports, maybe a little bit less distributed now that you're running the U.S. West but, one thing we keep hearing is that the frequency and the variety of the communications has got to go up a lot both in terms of, what you're talking about and how often you're talking to. And as you said, kind of getting into this, kind of human side, because you are getting invited into people's homes. What can you share that you guys have been doing best practices at a center forever because you've been managing distributed teams, since the very beginning? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, if you look at just this week, I spent eight hours with Julie and the entire Global Management Committee, the top 40 people, or so within Accenture. Every morning through video conferences, we interacted with Julie, highly interactive sessions, where we went through our strategy or financial results, some of the key initiatives we're trying to drive, and instead of what we would have done historically is fly 40 people to some part of the world, and how's them in a hotel room for two or three days to have the same session, we were incredibly more productive. We had three blocked hours per day over the last three days, again using digital media to engage with each other converse share our rich media content much more productive use of technology and frankly, a lot less wear and tear on people flying around the world, and as substantially lower cost. So, I think that that's something that is here to stay. I can't see us going back to the model where we, fly people around for internal meetings, certainly. From a West perspective, I meet with my management team, we scheduled calls now three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, typically, we get together for an hour. We conduct sort of what's going on with the business, where are the issues, what do we need to solve? And we do that entirely virtually, if you think about it, I'm getting, an hour or three hours a week with my entire leadership team, connected and collaborating around the same issues, in a much more kind of organized and concentrated way than if I ran into them at the coffee machine or at the water cooler. I am actually getting more engagement, more organization and more focus through my leadership team, in this new world than perhaps I would have had, in new. >> Right. >> So, I think that there's a lot of benefit, to this model. I still think that there's an opportunity to get, when we have large meetings and we need to sort of convey a particular message. It is nice to be able to get together with people physically. But I think that that's going to be less often now than in the past. >> Right, I just think people it's just different, right? It's not better or worse, it's just different. We had an interview earlier today. I think we had somebody on from Singapore, somebody on, from India, somebody on from Germany, our host was in Boston and the production was here in Palo Alto. You couldn't do that to get all those people together in a physical space is a lot bigger investment and a lot more difficult. So, it's just, it's different. It's not the same as being together. We can't go out and get a beer after this is over, but at the same time, it's a lot easier to grab an hour and get together with people. So, I think there is, it's different, it's not a substitute is different. >> Yeah, I mean, to that point, if you think about our clients they are global, their executives are global. The ability to actually connect with clients have a conversation regardles of where they are on the globe You know, it's, we are actually much more able to do that now because it doesn't require flying. It doesn't require sort of scheduling months ahead to make sure everyone can be in a particular location. You can literally just schedule a meeting and have it the next day. >> Jeff: Right. >> And that makes us much more responsive to our client's needs and much more accessible as they have questions for us. So I think there's definite advantages to this mode of working. >> Right. So Saleem, before I let you go, it's a great conversation and we could go all day, but we'll let you (laughs) get back to work. But I've just, especially since you come from a communications background and a 30 year veteran in this space I mean for as bad as this pandemic has been and it's bad, right? A lot of people are dead, a lot of businesses like restaurants and airlines, speaking of airlines and hotels, couldn't go digital right away. Right, we're fortunate to be in the knowledge business that we could. But what I really want to get your perspective is the fact that we have so many of these tools in place today that actually enabled it to happen kind of easily, right? We've got fast internet and we've got a high power mobile devices. And we have a huge suite of mobile applications from Salesforce to Slack, to Acuity. That's the software we use for scheduling. I mean, there's so many tools that, you look at had this happened 10 years ago, of five years ago, 15 years ago, a really different level of pain. And I'm sure, as you look back to the old days, put again application of that service providers and laying all this fiber and a lot of that stuff in 2000 looked like it wasn't necessarily going to pay off. And in fact, a lot of that infrastructure that was put in in those early days has really, kind of shined in this moment where it had to. And it's, I just love to get kind of your perspective with a little bit of a history of how these systems have developed and are in place and really enabled, kind of this work from anywhere, communicate from anywhere, almost do anything as long as you've got access to some type of a device and an internet connection. >> Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you that the broadband infrastructure investments that our telco clients have made over the last, two decades or so have really come into their own through this crisis. I think if you look at the level of investment, Microsoft, Amazon and Google have made in Cloud infrastructure has enabled, our organization, as well as many others, to be able to turn on a dime with respect to this crisis. I actually think that emerging economies that are implementing for example, 5G technologies, and adopting those technologies sometimes faster than their Western counterparts are actually, will leap frog, with respect to using those technologies, and allow if you will, their economies, their businesses, to sustain these kinds of impacts in a much more ready way in the future than perhaps in the past. And I think that, digital and digital transformation is sort of a element to the  business in the future and frankly, to sustaining, economies. So, I think mobile technology, Cloud technology, and the ability to sort of digitize your business and your economy are critical success factors for the future. >> Yeah, if not, you're in trouble because everybody else is doing it. >> Exactly. (Jeff laughs) >> All right, Saleem. Well, thank you for spending a few minutes, sharing your insight, really appreciate it. And congratulations on the new position. I'll look forward to seeing you in that beautiful, innovation Hub, one of these days, as soon as we can get back outside. >> Yeah, thank you so much, Jeff, I look forward to having you at the San Francisco Hub and showing you the virtual implementation of that Hub on our CMS platform. >> Awesome, look forward to it, thanks a lot. >> All right, you take care. >> All right, he's Saleem, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios on this kind of continuing leadership series that we've put together. Reaching out to the community for tips and tricks on kind of getting through what is, this kind of ongoing COVID crisis and situation as it continues to go weeks and weeks and weeks. And I'm really excited to have one of my favorite members of our community, is Nick Mehta, the CEO of Gainsight. Had the real pleasure of interviewing him a couple times and had to get him on. So Nick, thanks for taking some time out of your very busy day to join us. >> Jeff, honored to be here, thank you. >> Pleasure, so let's just jump into it. One of the reasons I wanted to get you on, is that Gainsight has been a distributed company from the beginning, and so I think the COVID, suddenly everyone got this work from home order, there was no prep, there was no planning, it's like this light switch digital transformation moment. So love to hear from someone who's been doing it for awhile. What are some of the lessons? How should people think about running a distributed company? >> Yeah, it's really interesting, Jeff, 'cause we are just by happenstance, from the beginning, distributed where we have, our first two offices were St. Louis and Hyderabad, India. So two places you cannot get there through one flight. So, you have to figure out how to collaborate asynchronously and then over time, we have offices in the Bay Area. We have tons of people that work from home. And so we try to tell people we don't have a headquarters. The headquarters is wherever you are, wherever you live and wherever you want to work. And so we've always been super flexible about come in to the office if you want, don't come in, et cetera. So different than some companies in that respect. And because of that, pre-COVID, we always a very heavy video culture, lots of video conferencing. Even if some people were in an office, there's always somebody else dialing in. One benefit we got from that is you never had to miss your kids' stuff or your family things. I would go to my daughter's performance in the middle of the day and know I can just dial into a call on the way there. And so we always had that. But what's amazing is now we're all on a level playing field, there's nobody in our office. And I got to say, this is, in some ways, even better 'cause I feel like when you're the person dialed in, and a lot of people are in a room, you probably had that experience, and it feels like you're kind of not on the same playing field, right? Hard to hear the jokes or the comments and you might not feel like you're totally in crowd, so to speak, right? But now everyone's just at their computer, sitting there in a chair all day doing these Zooms and it does feel like it's equalizing a little bit. And what it's caused us to do is say, hey, what are ways we can all recreate that community from home? So as an example, every 7:45 a.m. every day, we have a Zoom call that's just pure joy and fun. Trivia, pets, kids. The employees' kids announce people's birthdays and the weather. And so these ways we've been able to integrate our home and our work that we never could before, it's really powerful. It's a tough situation overall, and we feel for all the people affected. But even in tough situations, there are silver linings, and we're finding 'em. >> Yeah, it's funny, we just had Darren Murph on the other day. I don't know if you know Darren. He is the head of Remote Work at GitLab, and he-- >> Oh, yeah. >> And he talked about kind of the social norms. And one of the instances that he brought up was, back in the day when you had some people in the office, some people joining via remote, that it is this kind of disharmony because they're very different situations. So one of his suggestions was have everybody join via their laptop, even if they're sitting at their desk, right? So, as you said, you get kind of this level playing field. And the other thing which dovetails off what you just said is he always wanted executives to have a forcing function to work from home for an extended period of time, so they got to understand what it's all about. And it's not only looking through a little laptop or this or that, but it's also the distractions of the kids and the dogs and whatever else is happening around the house. So it is wild how this forcing function has really driven it. And his kind of takeaway is, as we, like say, move from can we get it into cloud to cloud first? And does it work on mobile to mobile first? >> Now it's really-- >> Yeah. >> It's really remote first. And if you-- >> Remote first. >> A remote first attitude about it and kind of turn it on it's head, it's why shouldn't it be remote versus can it be remote? It really changes the conversation and the dynamic of the whole situation. >> I love that. And just, GitLab, by the way, has been a true inspiration 'cause they are the most remote, remote company. And they share so much, I love what you said. As just two examples of reacting to what you said, pre-COVID, we always wanted to keep a level playing field. So we actually moved our all-hands meetings to be instead of being broadcast from one room, and you're kind of seeing this small screen with all these people, we all just were at computers presenting. And so everyone's on a level playing field. So I thought what GitLab said is great. And then the other point, I think post-COVID we have learned is the kids and the dogs aren't distractions, they're part of our life. And so embracing those and saying, hey, I see that kid in the background, bring them onto the screen. Even during work meetings, even customer meetings, you know? And I'm seeing, I'm on a customer meeting and the customer's bringing their kids onto the screen and it's kind of breaking this artificial wall between who we are at home and who we are at work 'cause we're human beings all throughout. At Gainsight, we talk about a human first approach to business and we've never been more human as a world than we are right now. >> Love it, love it. So another, get your thoughts on, is this whole idea of measurement and productivity at home. And it's really, I have to say, disturbing to see some of the new product announcements that are coming out in terms of people basically snoopin' on people. Whether it's trackin' how many hours of Zoom calls they're on, or how often are they in the VPN, or having their camera flip on every so many minutes or something. We had Marten Mickos on, who's now the CEO of HackerOne. He was CEO at MySQL years ago before it went to Sun and he had the great line, he said, it's so easy to fake it at the office, but when you're at home and you're only output is your deliverable, it makes it a lot easier. So I wonder if you can share some of your thoughts in terms of kind of managing output, setting expectations, to get people to get their work done. And then, as you see some of these new tools for people that are just entering this thing, it's just not right (chuckles). >> Yeah, I agree with you and Marten. I'm a huge fan of Marten, as well, I totally agree with both of it. And I think there's an older approach to work, which is more like a factory. It's like you got to see how many widgets you're processing and you got to micromanage and you got to monitoring and inspecting. Look, I don't run a factory, so maybe there are places where that model makes sense. So I'm not going to speak for every leader, but I could say if you're in a world where your job is information, services, software, where the value is the people and their knowledge, managing them that way is a losing battle. I go back to, some folks probably know, this famous TED Talk by Dan Pink on basically what motivates people. And in these knowledge worker jobs, it's autonomy, mastery and purpose. So autonomy, we have the freedom to do what we want. Mastery, we feel like we're getting better at jobs. And purpose, which is I have a why behind what I do. And I think, take that time you spend on your micromanagement and your Zoom, analyzing the Zoom sessions, and spend it on inspiring your team, on the purpose. Spend it on enabling your team in terms of mastery. Spend it on taking away barriers so they have more autonomy. I think you'll get way more out of your team. >> Yeah, I agree. I think it's, as Darren said, again, he's like, well, would you trust your people if you're on the fourth floor and they're on the sixth? So just-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> If you don't trust your people, you got to bigger issue than worrying about how many hours they're on Zoom, which is not the most productive use of time. >> People waste so much time in the office, and getting to the office. And by the way, I'm not saying that it's wrong, it's fine too. But it's not like the office is just unfettered productivity all the time, that's a total myth. >> Yes, so let's shift gears a little bit and talk about events. So, obviously, the CUBE's in the event business. We've had to flip completely 'cause all the events are, well, they're all going digital for sure, and/or postponing it or canceling. So we've had to flip and do all dial-ins and there's a whole lot of stuff about asynchronous. But for you, I think it's interesting because as a distributed company, you had Gainsight Pulse as that moment to bring people together physically. You're in the same boat as everybody else, physical is not an option this year. So how are you approaching Gainsight Pulse, both because it's a switch from what you've done in the past, but you at least had the benefit of being in a distributed world? So you probably have a lot of advantages over people that have never done this before. >> Yeah, that's a really interesting, insightful observation. So just for a context, Pulse is an event we do every year to bring together the customer success community. 'Cause, as you observed, there is value in coming together. And so this is not just for our employees, this is for all the customer success people, and actually increasingly product management people out there, coming together around this common goal of driving success for your customers. And it started in 2013 with 300 people, and last year, we had 5,000 people at our event in San Francisco. We had similar events in London and Sydney. And so it's a big deal. And there's a lot of value to coming together physically. But obviously, that's not possible now, nor is it advisable. And we said, okay, how do we convert this and not lose what's special about Pulse? And leverage, like you said, Jeff, the fact that we're good at distributed stuff in general. And so we created what we call Pulse Everywhere. We didn't want to call it Pulse Virtual or something like that, Pulse Webinar, because we didn't want to set the bar as just like, oh, my virtual event, my webinar. This is something different. And we called it Everywhere, 'cause it's Pulse wherever you are. And we joke, it's in your house, it's in your backyard, it's on the peloton, it's walking the dog. You could be wherever you are and join Pulse this year, May 13th and 14th. And what's amazing is last year we had 5,000 people in person, this year we already have 13,000 people registered as of the end of April. And so we'll probably have more than three times the number of people at Pulse Everywhere. And we're really bringing that physical event concept into the virtual, literally with, instead of a puppy pit, where you're in a physical event, you'll bring puppies often, we have a puppy cam where you can see the puppies. We're not giving up on all of our silly music videos and jokes and we actually ship cameras and high-end equipment to all the speakers' houses. So they're going to have a very nice digital experience, our attendees are. It's not going to be like watching a video conference call. It's going to be like watching a TV show, one much like what you try to do here, right? And so we have this amazing experience for all of our presenters and then for the audience. And we're really trying to say how do we make it so it feels like you're in this really connected community? You just happen to not be able to shake people's hands. So it's coming up in a few weeks. It's a big experiment, but we're excited about it. >> There's so many conversations, and we jumped in right away, when this was all going down, what defines a digital event? And like you, I don't like the word virtual. There's nothing fake or virtual. To me, virtual's second to life. And kind of-- >> Yeah. >> Video game world. And like you, we did, it can't be a webinar, right? And so, if you really kind of get into the attributes of what is a webinar? It's generally a one-way communication for a significant portion of the allocated time and you kind of get your questions in and hopefully they take 'em, right? It's not a truly kind of engaged process. That said, as you said, to have the opportunity to separate creation, distribution and consumption of the content, now opens up all types of opportunity. And that's before you get into the benefits of the democratization, as you said, we're seeing that with a lot of the clients we work with. Their registration numbers are giant. >> Totally. >> Because-- >> You're not traveling to spend money, yeah. >> It'll be curious to see what the conversion is and I don't know we have a lot of data there. But, such a democratizing opportunity. And then, you have people that are trying to force, as Ben Nelson said on, you know Ben from Minerva, right? A car is not a mechanical horse, they're trying to force this new thing into this old paradigm and have people sit for, I saw one today, 24 hours, in front of their laptop. It's like a challenge. And it's like, no, no, no. Have your rally moment, have your fun stuff, have your kind of your one-to-many, but really there's so much opportunity for many-to-many. >> Many-to-many. >> Make all the content out there, yeah. >> We've created this concept in this Pulse Everywhere event called Tribes. And the idea is that when you go to an event, the goal is actually partially content, but a lot of times it's connection. And so in any given big event, there's lots of little communities out there and you want to meet people "like you". Might be people in a similar phase of their career, a similar type of company, in our case, it could be companies in certain industry. And so these Tribes in our kind of Pulse Everywhere experience, let people break out into their own tribes, and then kind of basically chat with each other throughout the event. And so it's not the exact same thing as having a drink with people, but at least a little bit more of that serendipitous conversation. >> Right, no, it's different and I think that's really the message, right? It's different, it's not the same. But there's a lot of stuff you can do that you can't do in the physical way, so quit focusing on what you can't do and embrace what you can. So that's great. And good luck on the event. Again, give the plug for it. >> Yeah, it's May 13th and 14th. If you go to gainsightpulse.com you can sign up, and it's basically anything related to driving better success for your customers, better retention, less churn, and better product experience. It's a great event to learn. >> Awesome, so I want to shift gears one more time and really talk about leadership. That's really kind of the focus of this series that we've been doing. And tough times call for great leadership. And it's really an opportunity for great leaders to show their stuff and let the rest of us learn. You have a really fantastic style. You know I'm a huge fan, we're social media buddies. But you're very personable and you're very, kind of human, I guess, is really the best word, in your communications. You've got ton of frequency, ton of variety. But really, most of it has kind of this human thread. I wonder if you can share kind of your philosophy behind social, 'cause I think a lot of leaders are afraid of it. I think they're afraid that there is reward for saying something stupid is not worth the benefit of saying okay things. And I think also a lot of leaders are afraid of showing some frailty, showing some emotion. Maybe you're a little bit scared, maybe we don't have all the answers. And yet you've really, you're not afraid at all. And I think it's really shines in the leadership activities and behaviors and things you do day in and day out. So how do you think about it? What's your strategy? >> Yeah, it's really interesting you ask, Jeff, because I'm in a group of CEOs that get together on a regular basis, and I'm going to be leading a session on social media for CEOs. And honestly, when I was putting it together, I was like, it's 2020, does that still need to exist? But somehow, there is this barrier. And I'll talk more about it, but I think the barrier isn't just about social media, it's just about how a CEO wants to present herself or himself into the world. And I think, to me, the three things to ask yourself are, first of all, why? Why do you want to be on social media? Why do you want to communicate to the outside? You should have a why. Hopefully you enjoy it, but also you're connecting from a business perspective with your customers. And for us, it's been a huge benefit to really be able to connect with our customers. And then, who are you targeting? So, I actually think an important thing to think about is it's okay to have a micro-audience. I don't have millions of Twitter followers like Lady Gaga, but within the world of SaaS and customer success and retention, I probably have a decent number. And that means I can really connect with my own specific audience. And then, what. So, the what is really interesting 'cause I think there's a lot of non-obvious things about, it's not just about your business. So I can tweet about customer success or retention and I do, but also the, what, about you as an individual, what's happening in your family? What's happening in the broader industry, in my case of SaaS? What's happening in the world of leading through COVID-19? All the questions you've asked, Jeff, are in this lens. And then that gets you to the final which is the, how. And I think the, how, is the most important. It's basically whether you can embrace the idea of being vulnerable. There's a famous TED Talk by Brene Brown. She talks about vulnerability is the greatest superpower for leaders. I think the reason a lot of people have a hard time on social media, is they have a hard time really being vulnerable. And just saying, look, I'm just a human being just like all of you. I'm a privileged human being. I have a lot of things that luckily kind of came my way, but I'm just a human being. I get scared, I get anxious, I get lonely, all those things. Just like all of you, you know. And really being able to take off your armor of, oh, I'm a CEO. And then when you do that, you are more human. And it's like, this goes back to this concept of human first business. There's no work persona and home persona, there's just you. And I think it's surprising when you start doing it, and I started maybe seven, eight, nine years ago, it's like, wow, the world wants more human leaders. They want you to just be yourself, to talk about your challenges. I had the kids, when we got to 13,000 registrations for Pulse Everywhere, they pied me in the face. And the world wants to see CEOs being pied in the face. Probably that one, for sure, that's a guaranteed crowd pleaser. CEOs being pied in the face. But they want to see what you're into outside of work and the pop culture you're into. And they want to see the silly things that you're doing. They want you to be human. And so I think if you're willing to be vulnerable, which takes some bravery, it can really, really pay off for your business, but I think also for you as a person. >> Yeah, yeah. I think it's so insightful. And I think people are afraid of it for the wrong reasons, 'cause it is actually going to help people, it's going to help your own employees, as well, get to know you better. >> Totally, they love it. >> And you touched on another concept that I think is so important that I think a lot of people miss as we go from kind of the old broadcast world to more narrow casting, which is touching your audience and developing your relationship with your audience. So we have a concept here at theCUBE that one is greater than 1% of 100. Why go with the old broadcast model and just spray and you hope you have these really ridiculously low conversion rates to get to that person that you're trying to get to, versus just identifying that person and reaching out directly to those people, and having a direct engagement and a relative conversation within the people that care. And it's not everybody, but, as you said, within the population that cares about it it's meaningful and they get some value out of it. So it's a really kind of different strategy. So-- >> I love that. >> You're always get a lot of stuff out, but you are super prolific. So you got a bunch of projects that are just hitting today. So as we're getting ready to sit down, I see you just have a book came out. So tell us a little bit about the book that just came out. >> Sure, yeah, it's funny. I need to get my physical copy too at my home. I've got so a few, just for context. Five years ago, we released this first book on "Customer Success" which you can kind of see here. It's surprising really, really popular in this world of SaaS and customer success and it ties, Jeff, to what you just said which is, you don't need to be the book that everyone in the world reads, you need to be the book that everyone in your world reads. And so this book turned out to be that. Thousands of company management teams and CEOs in software and SaaS read it. And so, originally when this came out, it was just kind of an introduction to what we call customer success. Basically, how do you retain your customers for the long-term? How do you get them more value? And how do you get them to use more of what they've bought and eventually spend more money with you? And that's a mega-trend that's happening. We decided that we needed an update. So this second book is called "Customer Success Economy." It just came out, literally today. And it's available on Amazon. And it's about the idea that customer success started in tech companies, but it's now gone into many, many industries, like healthcare, manufacturing, services. And it started with a specific team called the customer success management team. But now it's affecting how companies build products, how they sell, how they market. So it's sort of this book is kind of a handbook for management teams on how to apply customer success to your whole business and we call it "Customer Success Economy" 'cause we do think the future of the economy isn't about marketing and selling transactional products, but it's about making sure what your customers are buying is actually delivering value for them, right? That's better for the world, but it's also just necessary 'cause your customers have the power now. You and I have the power to decide how to transport ourselves, whether it's buying a car or rideshare, in the old world when we could leave our house. And we have the power to decide how we're going to stay in a city, whether it's a hotel or Airbnb or whatever. And so customers have the power now, and if you're not driving success, you're not going to be able to keep those customers. And so "Customer Success Economy" is all about that. >> Yeah, and for people that aren't familiar with Gainsight, obviously, there's lots of resources that they can go. They should go to the show in a couple weeks, but also, I think, the interview that we did at PagerDuty, I think you really laid out kind of a great definition of what customer success is. And it's not CRM, it has nothing to do with CRM. CRM is tracking leads and tracking ops. It's not customer success. So, people can also check that. But I want to shift gears again a little bit because one, you also have your blog, MehtaPhysical, that came out. And you just came out again recently with a new post. I don't know when you, you must have a army of helper writers, but you talk about something that is really top of mind right now. And everyone that we get on theCUBE, especially big companies that have the benefit of a balance sheet with a few bucks in it, say we want to help our customers, we want to help our people be safe, obviously, that's first. But we also want to help our customers. But nobody ever really says what exactly does that mean? And it's pretty interesting. You lay out a bunch of things that are happening in the SaaS world, but I jumped on, I think it's number 10 of your list, which is how to think about helping your customers. And you give some real specific kind of guidance and guidelines and definitions, if you will, of how do you help our customers through these tough times. >> Yeah, so I'll summarize for the folks listening. One of the things we observed is, in this terrible tough times right now, your customers are in very different situations. And for simplicity, we thought about three categories. So the companies that we call category one, which are unfortunately, adversely affected by this terrible crisis, but also by the shutdown itself, and that's hotels, restaurants, airlines, and you can put other folks in that example. What do those customers need? Well, they probably need some financial relief. And you have to figure out what you're going to do there and that's a hard decision. And they also just need empathy. It's not easy and the stress level they have is massive. Then you've got, on the other extremes, a small number of your customers might be doing great despite this crisis or maybe even because of it, because they make video conferencing technology or remote work technology, or they make stuff for virtual or telemedicine. And those folks actually are likely to be super busy because they're just trying to keep up with the demand. So what they need from you is time and help. And then you got the people in between. Most companies, right, where there may be a mix of some things going well, some don't. And so what we recommended is think about your strategy, not just inside out, what you want, but outside in, what those clients need. And so as an example, you might think about in that first category, financial relief. The second category, the companies in the middle, they may need, they may not be willing to spend more money, but they may want to do more stuff. So maybe you unlock your product, make it available, so they can use everything in your suite for a while. And maybe in that third category, they're wiling to spend money, but they're just really busy. So maybe you offer services for them or things to help them as they scale. >> Yeah, so before I let you go, I just want to get your reaction to one more great leader. And as you can tell, I love great leaders and studying great leaders. Back when I was in business school we had Dave Pottruck, who at that time was the CEO of Schwab, come and speak and he's a phenomenal speaker and if you ever get a chance to see him speak. And at that point in time, Schwab had to reinvent their business with online trading and basically kill their call-in brokerage for online brokerage, and I think that they had a fixed price of 19.99, whatever it was. This was back in the late 90s. But he was a phenomenal speaker. And we finished and he had a small dinner with a group of people, and we just said, David, you are a phenomenal speaker, why, how, why're you so good? And he goes, you know, it's really pretty simple. As a CEO, I have one job. It's to communicate. And I have three constituencies. I kind of have the street and the market, I have my internal people, and then I have my customers and my ecosystem. And so he said, I, and he's a wrestler, he said, you know I treated it like wrestling. I hired a coach, I practiced my moves, I did it over and over, and I embraced it as a skill and it just showed so brightly. And it's such a contrast to people that get wrapped around the axle with their ego, or whatever. And I think you're such a shiny example of someone who over communicates, arguably, in terms of getting the message out, getting people on board, and letting people know what you're all about, what the priorities are, and where you're going. And it's such a sheer, or such a bright contrast to the people that don't do that that I think is so refreshing. And you do it in a fun and novel and in your own personal way. >> That's awesome to hear that story. He's a inspirational leader, and I've studied him, for sure. But I hadn't heard this specific story, and I totally agree with you. Communication is not something you're born with. Honestly, you might know this, Jeff, or not, as a kid, I was super lonely. I didn't really have any friends and I was one of those kids who just didn't fit in. So I was not the one they would pick to be on stage in front of thousands of people or anything else. But you just do it over and over again and you try to get better and you find, I think a big thing is finding your own voice, your own style. I'm not a super formal style, I try to be very human and authentic. And so finding your style that works for you, I agree, it's completely learnable. >> Yeah, well, Nick, thank you. Thanks for taking a few minutes. I'm sure you're super, super busy getting ready for the show in a couple weeks. But it's always great to catch up and really appreciate you taking some time to share your thoughts and insights with us. >> Thank you, Jeff, it's an honor. >> All right, he's Nick Mehta, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (soft music)

okay we're back here live at the IBM iod information on demand conference hashtag IBM iod this is the cube so looking the anglo Mookie bonds flagship program we go out for the events extracting from the noise i'm john furrier might join my co-host Davey lonte and we'd love to have analysts in here and in this case former analyst James Cole Beatles welcome to back to the cube thank you very much John thank you Dave pleasure see you again finger of being at IOD you're a thought leader you are an influencer you work at IBM so you you're out there the front lines doing some great work so thank you very much tell us explains the folks out there not about the show because we've had some people coming in last year you were private in but what does this fit what is this vector in context to what's relevant the market obviously big data and analytics is the hottest thing on the planet right now and you got social business now emerging categorically here but it has a couple different flavors to it right within IBM's context yeah but the messaging is simple right you got analytics that drives value outcomes social business is the preferred way of people going to operate their businesses engagement and all that is great stuff new channels marketing eccentric cetera explain to them how I OD is fitting into these megatrends into mega trends I think the hottest trends why our customers caring about what's going on here is a lot of a lot of activity around customers what is what does IOD fit into that a bigger picture yeah well you know the world has changed the world culture has changed radically and really in the last decade or so none is everywhere in the world everything is now online and digital increasingly it's streaming in terms of culture look what's happening to Hollywood is being deconstructed by the netflixs of the world you know movies and TV and music and everything is delivered online now all engagement more more engagements with your employer with your you know with merchants with your family everywhere is online things like streaming media so if you look at how the world culture has changed I yesterday I spoke here on a topic that's near and dear to my heart called big media it's the support of the ascendance of streaming media and not just the area as I laid out but in education like MOOCs distance learning we use it internally at IBM for our think fridays and Ginni Rometty and the executive team you know every Friday its cloud or its big data or whatever you know we need all need to get up to speed on the world culture has changed now analytics is fundamental to that whole proposition in terms of world culture analytics driving gagement analytics in terms of you know in a business context analytics a 360-degree view and you have data warehouses and the master data and you have predictive models to drive segmentation and target marketing and all that good stuff you know that's been in business for a long time that those set of practices they have become prevalent in most industries now not just in say retailing you know the Amazons of the world they're pervasive across all industries big data is fundamental to that you know engagement model its social social in the sense that social is one of many channels through which business is engaged with through which many people engage the social is assumed assuming a degree of importance in the fabric of modern life that goes beyond simple you know engagement with you know brands and whatnot social is how people create is how they declare who they are it's their identity and so social in your personal life we all know about Facebook and Twitter and everything else and YouTube but social has revolutionized enterprise cultures everywhere you know we use social internally of course we use our own Lotus connections most large and even many mid-sized firms now use social for interactions among employees or throughout their Val you chain so social business is about all of that it's the b2c it's the b2b it's the e2e and employ to employ all these different models of engagement they all demand a number of things obviously the social platform they demand the data of various sorts structured unstructured in shared repositories or cubes or Mars or whatnot they it demands the the big data platforms not only at respite in motion the streaming media to make it all happen in real time so at IOD if you see what the themes are this year and really it's been a building for several years cloud everything social is running in the cloud now more and more not just public Claus but Federation's of public and private clouds it's it's all about cognitive computing which is a relatively new term in the Sun sets achieved a certain amount of vogue in the last year or so which is really fundamentally as an evolutionary trend it's basically a I for the 21st century but leveraging unstructured data and and machine learning and so forth and predictive analytics and you know well the whole world learn what metadata was with the whole NSA yeah comments no it's like me and then just to wrap it up in memory real-time blu acceleration you know you need real-time you need streaming you need collaboration and social you know peer-to-peer user-generated content all of that to make this new world culture really take off and IBM provides all that we recognize that that's where the world's going we've been orienting reorienting all of our solutions around these models cloud social increasingly going forward and you know we provide solutions that enable our customers in all industries to go there and big data is fundamental to all of that as we say we're computer science meets social science that's always been Silicon angles kind of masthead view but to unpack what you just said from the market relevance you mentioned Netflix we saw Amazon coming out their own movie they're going to go direct with their own programming so so but that speaks to the direct business model of the web was originally pioneered as hey direct business model cut the middleman out but now that dimension has been explored so that kind of what you're saying there so that's cool the end user pieces interesting image is social so what's your take on the end user orientation what's the expectation because you got social you got a trash you got in motion you got learning machines providing great recommendations got the Watson kind of yeah reasoning for people so personalization recommendation engines the sea change attention time currency big days of all those buzzwords all right what is the expectation for users in the future right now we're moving into this new world where I can self serve myself monologue based the information from the web now it's all coming at everyone real time the alarms are going off as Jeff Jonas says what is that prefer user experience the direct business model people get that I think the business to see that but now the end users are now at the center of the value proposition how do what's the role of the user now they're participating in the media there are also consumers of the media yeah and they now have different devices so what's the sources of data so fundamentally yeah the role of the consumers expectations now is always everything is always on everything is always online everything is all digital everything is all real time and streaming everything is all self-service everything is all available in the palm of my hand and then the back-end infrastructure the cross-channel infrastructure users don't care about individual socials they really don't they don't really fundamentally care about Facebook or Twitter or whatever you have they just care that what their experience is seamless as they move from one channel to another they're not perceived as channels anymore they're simply perceived as places or communities that overlap too in a dizzying array of socials thus social is where we all live and thus social increasingly is mobile increasingly mobile is you know the user expects that the handoff from my smartphone to my tablet to my laptop to my digital TV sentence and so forth that it all happens through the magic of infrastructure that it's being taken care of and they don't have to worry about that handoff it all it's all part of one seamless experience yeah they always just say the search business it's the it's the it's the intersection of contextual and behavioral yeah and now you take that online behaviors community contextual is context to what people are interested at any given time yeah it's so many longtail distributions at any given time so do you see the the new media companies that the new brands that might emerge mean there's all the talk about Marissa Mayer kind of turning over yahoo and yeah she some say putting lipstick on a pig but but but is that they're just an old older branch trying to be cool but is that what users want just like media but just user experience me like we're small media but we got big ideas but the thing is the outcomes right small frying big blues go figure are the outcomes still the same company still want to drive sales for their business sell a product provide great value you just want to find great content and find people I mean the same concept of the old web search find out and run sumit give any vision on how that environment will evolve for a user like is it going to be pushed at me do you see it a new portal developing is mmm Facebook's kind of a walled garden humble don't care about that what's your take on that the future vision of a user experience online user experience online future vision in many ways I think let's talk about Internet of Things because that keeps coming more and more into the discussion it's it's not so much that the user wants a seamless experience across channel cross device all that but a big part of that experience is the user knows that increasingly they'll have some confidence that whatever environments physical environments there in our being obviously there's privacy implications that surveillance here are being monitored and tracked and optimized to meet their requirements to some degree in other words environmental monitoring internet of things in your smart home you want to configure so you smart home so that every room that you walk into is as you as you're moving there even before you get there has already been optimized to your needs that ideally there should prediction Oh Jim's walking into the bathroom so turn the light on and also start to heat up the water because it's ten o'clock at night Jim's usually takes his bath around this time you sort of want that experience to be handled by the internet of things like nest these new tools like nest oh yeah yeah so essentially then it's my user experience is not just me interacting with devices but me simply moving through environments that are continuously optimized to my knees and needs of my family you know the whole notion of autonomous vehicles your vehicle if it's your personal vehicle then you want to always autumn optimize the experience in terms of like you know the heat setting and and the entertainment justement saan the you know the media center and they're always to be tailored to your specific needs at any point in time but also let's say you take a zipcar you rent a zipcar and you've got an ID with that company or any of the other companies that provide those on-demand rental car services ideally in this scenario that whatever vehicle you you rent through them for a few hours or so when you enter it it becomes your vehicle is completely customized to your needs because you're a loyal customer of that firm and they've got your profile information this is just a hypothetical I'm not speaking to anything that I actually know about what they're doing but fundamentally you know ideally any on-demand vehicle or conveyance or other item that you you lease in this new economy is personalized to your needs while you're using it and then as it were depersonalized when you check it back in so the next person can have it personalized to their use as long as they need it that's the vision of a big part of the vision of customer experience management personalization not just of your personal devices but personalization of almost any device or environment in which you are operating so that's one kanodia wants this question no I would ask one more question on that on the user experience came on Twitter from a big data alex says while you're on the subject which a my Alex I don't great great friend of the cube but thanks for the tweet today we don't have our crowd shado-pan we can get the chat going there but why not talk about AR and I've been in reality I mean honestly Internet of Things is now not the palm of your hand it could be on your wrist or on your clothing the wearables on the glasses and just gave out three invites to google glass so this is again another edition augmented reality is software paradigm as well what is that what is it what does that fit into that what's your take on augmented reality augmented reality ok so augmented reality is that which I don't use myself I've just simply seen it demonstrated and plenty of places so augmented reality is all about layers of additional information overlaid on whatever visual video view or image view that you happen to be carrying with you or have available to you while you're walking around in your normal life so right now conceivably if this is an AR a setting that I would environment or enabled device I would be able to see for example that ok who's in this room in the sense that who is declared that they are in this area of Mandalay Bay right now and why specifically are they doing to the extent that they allow that information to be seen and o of these people here which of these people if any might be the person I'm going to be speaking with it for 30 so that if they happen to be in this environment i can see that i can see that they're to some degree they may have indicated status waiting for james could be a list to get done with the Wikibon people oh that's kind of cool so I'd see that overlay and I walk to other parts of the Convention Center I might also see overlays as I walk around like oh there's a course down as several rooms down that I actually put in my schedule it's going to start in about five minutes I'll just duck you into there because it reminds me through the overlay that's the whole notion of personalization of the environment in which you're walking around in real time dynamically and contextual in alignment with your needs or with your requirements are in alignment also with these whatever data those environment managers wish to share to anybody who's subscribing in that contact so that's a context-aware that theme have been talking about here on textual essentially it's a public space that's personalized to your needs in the sense that you have a personalized view in a dynamically update okay that sounds like crowd chat Oh are we running a trip crouched at right now crouch at San overlay so just as lovely overlay so look to the minute social network yeah tailored to the needs of the group yep that adds value on top of that data yeah so James I gotta get your take on something so we had Merv on yesterday great Adrian with my great Buy analyst day and he was on last week at Big Data NYC you know we did our own little vent there Don coincident with hadoop world so Murph said well we're just entering the trough of disillusionment for big data yeah you love those Gartner you know I love medications tools I mean they are genius and I get him but he said that's a good thing because it goes left to right so we're making progress here ok right but I'm getting nervous the internet of things I love the concept we don't we don't work on industrial internet and you know a smarter planet it's in there so I love it but I'm getting nervous here's why I look back at a lot of the promises that were made in the BI days 360-degree other business predictive analytics a lot of things that are now talking about in the hood sort of Hadoop big data movement that we're actually fulfilling with this new wave that the old wave really wasn't able to fill because the cousin sort of distracted doing sarbanes-oxley and reporting in and balanced scorecards so so I'm nervous he's old school now it when he when he referenced is something that was hot in the mid part of the two thousand decade okay go ahead okay we had a guy on today talking about balance core would you know we're just talking about crowd chat that's the hottest day in 2013 like five years or hurt anybody mentions sarbanes-oxley so what kind of saved that whole business Roy thank you and Ron but so heavy right so what I'm nervous about as we as I've seen a number of waves over the years where the the vendor community promises a vision great vision great marketing and then all of a sudden something hotter comes along like Internet of Things and says don't know this is really it so my question to you is will help us it'll help me in my mind you know close that dissonance gap is are these two initiatives the sort of big data analytics for everybody putting analytics in the hands of business users yeah or is that sort of complementary to the internet of thing his internet of things just the new big trillion dollar market that everybody's going to go after and forget about all those promises about analytics everywhere help me sure Jay through that my job is to clarify confusion hey um you know if you look at the convergence of various call them paradigms there's a lot of big data analytics is one of them right now clearly there's cloud clearly their social there's big data analytics in mobile and there's something called Internet of Things so some some talk about smack smac social mobile analytic a que a big data cloud if you add IOT of there it's smack yet I don't think it works or smash yet but fundamentally if you think about Internet of Things it's it's all about machines or automated devices of various sorts probes and you know your smartphone and whatever I know servers or even you know the autonomous vehicles those are things that do things and you know they might be sources of data they would are they might be consumers of data they might conceivably even be intermediaries or brokers or routers or data what I'm getting at is that if you look at big data analytics I always think of it as a pipeline all data it's like data sources and data consumers and then there's all these databases and other functions that operate between them to move data and analytics and insight from one end to the other of the pipe in a conceptual way think of the internet of things as well a new category of sources of data these devices whether they be probes or monitors or your smart phones and new consumers and they all those same things are probably going to be many of them consumers of data and there's message passing among them and then the data that they passed might be passed in real time through streaming like InfoSphere streams it might be cached or stored and various intermediate databases and various analytics performed on them so think of you know I like to think of the internet of persons places and things persons that's human endpoints consumers and and sources of data that's all of us that's social places that's geospatial you know you think about it the Internet of geospatial you know geo spatial coordinates of of data and analytics and then there's things there's you know automated endpoints or you know hardware even Nana from macro to nano devices so it's just a new range of sources and and consumers of data and new types of analytics that are performed in new functions that can be performed and outcomes enable when you as it were stack in and out of things with social with claw with mobile new possibilities in terms of optimization in real time it throughout the you know the smarter planet if you think about the smarter planet vision it's all about interconnected instrumented and intelligent instrumented you know instrumentation that traditionally it suggests hardware instrumentation that's what probes our sensors and actuators that's the Internet of Things it's a fundamental infrastructure within smarter planet I'd love that thank you for clarifying i could write a blog post out of that and i think i'm very well made so um now i want to follow up and bring it back to the users I know snack and I thought you were going to say a story no smack MapReduce analytics and query or sell smack on the cube so so I want bring it back to the users so we had a great conversation yesterday actually last week I'll be met it was on off you know ah be met and he said look why are there any any you know where all the big data apps he said you need three things to for big data apps you need domain expertise you need algorithms which are free and you need data scientists like oh we'll never get there all right oh so rules really free while there are that was this argument yeah it means a source if people charge him for algorithms big trouble was this point I think okay sure so and then we had a discussion yesterday about how in the early days of the automobile industry you know the forecast was this is problematic the gap to adoption is just aren't enough chauffeurs know the premise that we were putting forth in the discussion yesterday I don't know who that was with was that with Judith it was good was that look we've got to figure out a way to get analytics in the hands of the business user we can't have to go through a data scientist or some business analyst no that's not going to work and we'll never get adoption so what what's going to bridge that gap is it is it the things you talked about before all these you know cool solutions that you guys are developing the project neo that you announce today visualization yeah there's another piece of that what puts it in the hands of guys like me that I can actually use the data in new and productive ways yeah well self-service business intelligence and visualization tools that are embedded in the very experience of using apps for example on your smartphone democratization of data science down to all of us you need the right tools you need you need the tools that the new generation of people like my children's generation just adopt and they work in there just a tune from from the cradle to working with data and visualizations and creating visual you know analytics of various sorts though they may not perceive it as being analytics they miss may perceive it as working with shapes and patterns and stuff yeah you would stop yeah so playing around you know in a sandbox i love that terminology data scientists working you know sandboxes which is data that's martes that they build to do regression analysis and segmentation and decision trees and all you know all that good stuff you know the fact is your sandbox can conceivably be completely on your handheld device with all the visualizations built-in you're simply doing searches and queries you know you're asking natural language questions you're looking at the responses you're changing your queries you're changing your visualizations and so forth to see if anything pops out at you as being significant playing around it you know it's as simple a matter that that these kinds of tools such as IBM you know cognos and so forth enable everybody to become as it worried a data scientist without having to you know become a maquette their profession it's just a part of the fabric of living in modern society where data surrounds us people are going to start playing with data and they're going to start teaching themselves all these capabilities in the same way that when they invented automobiles and you know wasn't Henry 42 invented them it was in like the late 1800s by engineers in Europe and America you know it's like we didn't all become auto mechanics you know there are trained auto mechanics but I think most human beings in the modern world know that there's a thing called an automobile that has an engine that needs gasoline and oil and occasionally needs to be brought to a professional mechanic for a repair and so forth we have many of us have a rough idea of something called a carburetor blah blah blah you know in the same way that when computers came up after world war two and then gradually invaded our lives through PCs and everything we all didn't become computer scientist but most of us have an idea of what a hard disk is most of it no most of us know something about something called software and things are called operating systems in the same way now in this new world most of us will become big data analytics geeks practical into the extent that will learn enough of the basic terms of art and the relationships among the various components to live our lives and when the stuff breaks down we call the likes of IBM to come and fix it or better yet they just buy our products and they just work magically all the time without fail conversing and comfortable with the concepts to the point which you can leverage them and what about visualization where does that fit visualization visualization is where the rubber meets the road of analytics is it's where human beings how human beings extract meaning insight fundamentally maybe that's like yeah you extracted inside a lots of different ways you do searches and so forth but to play around it to actually see you know a heat map or a geospatial map or or or you know a pie chart or whatever you see things with your eyes that you may not have realized we're there and if you can play around and play with different visualizations against the same data set things will pop out that you know the statistical model just seek the raw output of a data mining our predictive model or statistical analysis those patterns may not suggest themselves and rows of numbers that would pop out to an average human being or to a data scientist they need the visualizations to see things that you know because in other words when you think about analytics it's all about the algorithms that are drilling through the data to find those patterns but it's also about the visualizations the algorithms and you need the visualizations and of course you need the data to really enable human beings of all levels of expertise to find meaning and fundamentally visualizations are a lingua franca between non-expert human beings and expert eamon beings between data scientists visualizations are a lingua franca Hey look what I saw what do you think you know that's the whole promise of tools like concert for example we demonstrated this this morning it's a collaborative environment as sharing of visualizations and data sets and so forth among business analysts and the normal knowledge worker you know it with it you know like what do you see here's what I see what do you think I don't see that here's another visualization what do you see there oh yeah I think I see what you mean and here's my annotation about what I have broader context I've you know here's what I oh this is great that's the whole notion of humans deriving insight we derive it in socials we derive it in teams of that some Dave might be adept at seeing things that Jim is just absolutely blind to or you know Nancy might see things that both of us are applying to but we're all looking at the same pictures and we're all working with the same data part art yeah it's all so let's talk about some plumbing conversations you know one of the things that we noticed we were at the splunk conference this year's blown came out of nowhere taking log files making them manageable saving time for people so the thing that comes out of the splunk conversation is that it's just so easy to use that their customer testimonials are overwhelmingly positive around the area hey I just dumped my data into this the splunk box and it grid good stuffs happening I can search it it can give me insight save me time so that's the kind of ease of use so so how does IBM getting to that scenario because you guys have some good products we've got on the platform side but you also have some older products legacy Lotus other environments collaborative software that's all coming together in converging so how do we get to that environment where it's just that he just dumped your data in and let it do its magic well Odin go that's the very proposition that we provide with our puresystems puredata systems portfolio tree data system and big insights right for Hadoop so forth big in size you know we have an appliance now yeah we have pdh so that's the whole create load and go scenario that because Bob pidgeotto unless wretched and others demonstrated on the main stage yesterday and today so we did we do that and we are simple and straight being easy to use and so forth that's our value prop that's the whole value prop of an appliance you know simple you don't need a ton of expertise we pre build all the expert in a expertise patterns that you can use to derive quick value from this deployment we provide industry solution accelerates from machine data analytics on top of big insights to do the kinds of things you're talking about with splunk offerings so fundamentally you know that's scenario we all we and we're you know we have many fine competitors we offer that capability now in terms of the broader context you're describing we're a well-established provider of solutions we go back more than a hundred years we have many different product portfolios we have lots and lots of customers who would invested in IBM for a long time they might have our older products our newer products in various combinations we support the older generations we strive to migrate our customers to the newer releases when they're ready we don't force them to migrate so we make very we're very careful in our row maps to provide them with a migration path and to make it worth their while to upgrade when the time comes to the newer feature ok so I got it don't change gears to the to the shiny new toy conversation which is you know you know we love that in Silicon Valley what's a shiny new toy there's always an emerging markets when you have see changes like this where there's a whole the new whole new wave comes in creates new wealth old gets destructed new tags over whatever the conversation goes but I got to ask you okay well Elsa to the IBM landscape that you that you're over overlooking with big data and under the under the hood with cloud etc there's always that one thing that kind of breaks out as the leader the leading toy a shiny object that that people gravitate to as as I'm honest I won't say lost later because you got you know it's not not about giving away free it's it's the product that goes well we this is the lead horse you know and in this game right yeah so what is that what is the IBM thing right now that you're doubling down on is it blu acceleration is it incites is it point2 with a few highlights right now that's really cutting through the new the new the new soil of yeah we're developing our own rip off version of google glass thank you know I'm saying it's always I mean I'm gonna say shiny too but there's always that sexy product well I want that I want L customers name I want that product which leads more you know how she lifts for other products is there one is there a few you can talk about that you've noticed anecdotally is going to be specific data but just observational a shiny toy for the consumer market or for the business business business mark okay yeah yeah is it Watson is Watson the draw is it what's the headline looking for the lead lead dog here what's the attack there's always one an emerging market well you can put your the spot here well you could say that the funny thing is the whole notion of a shiny new toy implies something tangible when the world is gone more and more intangible in the cloud so we are moving our entire portfolio beginning links the big data analytics solutions into the cloud cloud first development going forward our other core principles for the pure data systems portfolio and the light for the shiny the shiny new thing the new cons could be shiny new concept or new paradigm yeah but the shiny new thing is the cloud the cloud is something pervasive and the cloud is something that it really multi form factors that's not very sexy but customers want flexibility you know they want to acquire the same functionality either as a licensed software package and running on commodity hardware we offer that for our big data analytics offerings or as an appliance and one sort or another that specialized particular occurrence or as a SAS cloud offering or as a capability that they can deploy in a virtualization layer on top of IBM or non-ibm hardware or they want the abilities you can mix and match those various deployment form factors so in many ways the whole notion of multi form factor flexibility is the shiny new thing it's the hybrid model for deployment of these capabilities on Prem in the cloud combination thereof that's not terribly sexy because it's totally it's totally abstract but it's totally real I mean demand wise people can see them that drives my business because when you go to the cloud I mean that's where you can really begin to scale seriously beyond the petabytes the whole notion of big media it will exist entirely in the cloud big media I like to think is the next sexy thing because streaming is coming into every aspect of human existence where stream computing a lot of people who focus on Big Data think of volume as being like big headline oh god we'd go to petabytes and exabytes and all that yeah it's important some really fixate on variety all these disparate sources of data and now we have all the sensor data and that's very important we have all the social media and everything all those new sources that's extremely important but look at the velocity everybody is expecting real-time instantaneous continuous streaming you know everything we do all of our entertainment all of our education surveillance you know everything is completely streaming I think ubiquitous streaming to every device and everybody themselves continue to continuing to stream their very lives everywhere all the time is the sexy new thing Dave and I talk about running data we coined that term running data what four years ago so I got to get you got to get kind of a thought leader they're watching us and we're watching streaming data right now from these said these are your guys are streaming this is big media give us some wanna get your thought leader perspective here some thought leader mojo around um the hashtag data economy you know you need now you're moving into a conversation with c-level folks and they said James tell me what the hell is this data economy thing right so what is the data economy in your words kind of like I mean I'll say it's a mindset I'll everything else what's your take on that we've been discussing that internally and externally at IBM we're trying to get our heads around what that means here's my take as one IBM are one thought Leigh right by the way the trick of being a thought leader is just to let your own thoughts lead you where they will turn around where all my followers yeah hopefully they want to lead you to far astray where you're out in the wilderness too long that's an important type of people are talking about because people are trying to put the definition around at economy can you actually have a business construct around yeah data here is my taken on the layers of the meaning of data economy it's monetizing your data the whole notion of monetization of your data data becomes a product that you generate internally or that you source from externally but you repackage it up and then resell with value add the whole notion of data monetization and you know implies a marketplace for data based products you know when I say data I'm using it in the broader context of it could be streaming media as the kind of one is a very valuable category of you know data like you know whatever kollywood provides so there's a whole notion of monetizing your data or providing a marketplace for others to monetize their data and you take a transaction fee from that or it also means in more of a traditional big data or data warehousing bi sense it means that you drive superior outcomes for your your own business from your own data you know through the usual method of better decision if better decisions on trustworthy data and the like so if you look at data monetization in terms of those layers including the marketplace including you know data-driven okay in many ways the whole notion of a data economy hinges on everybody's realization now that the chief resource for betterment of humanity one of the chief resources going forward for us to get smarter as a species on this planet is to continue to harness the data that we ourselves generate you know people stop what data is being the new oil what oil was there before we ever evolved but data wasn't there before we we landed on earth or before we evolved we generate that so it's our own exhaust your own exhaust that's actually a renewable resource data exhaust from data from exhausted gold that's what we say data is the data exhaust it's good if you can harness it and put it together as Jeff Jones says the puzzle piece is the picture the big picture at the smarter picture the smarter planet so on the final question I want to wrap up here to our next guest but what's going on with you these days talk about what's up with you you know you're very active on Facebook will you give a good following I'll be coming up what's happening you know I'll make sure I said big birthday for you on your Facebook page what's going on in your life I'll see you're working at IBM one of the things are interesting what's on your mind these days when you're at leisure are you hanging out you think what are you thinking about the most what are you doing with your you know things with your family's cherith let's see what's going on well I hang out at home with my wife and drink beer and listen to music and tweet about it everybody knows that stuff kind of beer do you drink whatever is on sale I'm not going to say where we buy it but it's a very nice place that whose initials are TJ but fundamentally you know my my mind is an open book because I evangelize I put my thoughts and my work thoughts and love my personal thoughts out there on socials I lived completely ons but I completely unsocial I self-edit but fundamentally the thought leadership I produce that the blogs and whatnot I produce all the time I put them out there for general discussion and I get a lot of good sort of feedback the world and including from inside of IBM I just try to stretch people's minds what's going on with me I'm just enjoying what I'm doing for a living now people save Jim you're with IBM why aren't you an analyst I'm still doing very analyst style work in in a vendor context I'm a thought leader I was a thought leader as I try to be being a thought leader is like being a humorist it's like it's a statement of your ambition not your outcome or your results yeah you can write jokes too you're blue in the face but if nobody laughs then you're not a successful comedian likewise i can write thought leadership pieces till I'm blue in the face but if nobody responds that I'm not leaving anybody anywhere i'm just going around in circles so my my ambition and every single day is to say at least one thing that might stretch somebody's box a little bit wider yeah yeah I think I think IBM smart they've been in social for a while the content markings about you know marketing to individuals yeah with credibility so I love analysts I love all my buds like like Merv and everybody else and I'm you know sort of a similar cat but you know there's a role for X analysts inside of solution providers and we have any number John Hegarty we have we have Brian Hill another X forest to write you know it's it's a you know it's a big industry but it's a small industry we have smart people on both sides of the equation solution provider and influencer my line um under people 99 seats and you know I I suck up to my superiors at IBM i suck up to any analyst who says nice things about me and hosts be on their show and i was going out of my life i'm just a big suck up well we like we like to have been looking forward to doing some crowd chats with you our new crouch an application with you guys lock you into that immediately it's a thought leader haven that the Crouch as as it turns out Dave what's your take on the analyst role at IBM just do a little analysis of the analyst at IBM which you're taken well I think it's under situation I think that the role that they that IBM's put James in is precisely the way in which corporations vendors should use former analysts they should give you a wide latitude a platform and and not try to filter you you know and you're good like that and so guess what I do the usual marketing stuff to the traditional but I do the new generation of thought leadership marketing and there's a role for both of those to me marketing have said this is if I said it was I said a hundred times marketing should be a source of value to people and it's so easy to make marketing a source of value by writing great content or producing great content so yeah that's my take on a jonathan your your marketing is a great explainer you explain the value to the market and thereby hopefully for your company generate demand hopefully in the direction of your cut your customers buying your things but that's what analysts the influencers should be explainers it's you know probably Dave I mean has influenced as influences that we are with with a qu here's my take on it when you have social media of direct full transparency there's no you can't head fake anyone anymore that all those days are gone so analyst bloggers people who are head faking a journalist's head faking the house the audiences will find out everything so to me it's like it's the metaphor of when someone knocks on your door your house and you open it up and they want to sell you something you shut the door in their face when you come in there and they say hey I want to hang out I got you know I got some free beer and a big-screen TV you want to watch some football maybe you invite him in the living room so the idea of communities and direct marketing's about when if you let them into your living room yeah you're not selling right you are creating value see what i do i drop smart i try to drop smart ideas into every conversational contacts throughout socials and also at events like i od so you know a big part of what I do is I thought leadership marketer is not just right you know you're clever blogs and all that but I simply participate in all the relevant conversations where I want I want ideas to be introduced and oh by they want way I definitely want people to be aware that I am an IBM employee and my company's provides really good products and services and support you know that's really a chief role of an evangelist in a high-tech slider that's one of the reasons why we started crouched at because the hashtag get so difficult to go deep into so creates crowd chatter let's go deeper and have a conversation and add some value to it you know it's you thinking about earned media as parents been kicked around but in communities the endorsement of trust earning a position whether you work at IBM people don't care a he works at IBM or whatever if you're creating value and you maybe have some free beer you get an entry but you win on your own merits you know I'm saying at the end of the day the content is the own merits and I think that's the open source paradigm that is hitting the content business which is community marketing if your pain-in-the-ass think you're going to get bounced out right out of the community or if you're selling something you're on so you guys do a great job really am i awesome you thank you James I really love what you add to the iod experience here with this corner and all the interviews is great great material well thanks for having us here really appreciate it I learned a lot it's been great you guys are great to work with very professional the products got great great-looking luqman portfolio hidden all hitting all the buttons there so hitting all the Gulf box so this is the cube we'll be right back with our last interview coming up shortly with Jeff Jonas he's got some surprises for us so we'll we'll see what he brings brings to his a game apparently he told me last night is bring his a-game to the cube so I'm a huge Jeff Jonas fan he's a rock star we love them on the cube iza teka athlete like yourself we write back with our next guest after this short break

live at hadoop summit this is SiliconANGLE and wiki bonds exclusive coverage of hadoop summit this is the cube our flagship program would go out the advanced extract the signal from the noise i'm to enjoy my co-host Jeff Kelly Jeff welcome to the cube Scott welcome to the cube great to have you here so you kicked off help kick off the show this morning with your keynote talking about a number of things among them the new teradata plans for Hadoop brought it on stage which I thought was great i love i love some i was joined by a dancing appliance okay great it was fantastic a good-looking appliance it was but why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself kind of your role and then we'll kind of get into what tara date is doing here at the show and some of the some of the strategies you're taking towards the big data market okay great well I'm Scott now I'm from tarde de labs and turny two labs is actually organization within teradata that is responsible for research development engineering product management product marketing all the products all of the technology that we roll out kind of the innovation engine of teradata is what we're responsible for and we've been obviously affiliated with hadoop summit we were here last year it's really great to be back having been in the in the data warehouse big data kind of data analytics business for a long time the one thing I have to say about this whole movement in the Hadoop space is that it's unlike anything else I've seen in that it's every geography it's every industry and there's so much energy and emotion around it's unlike any other transition that I've seen and even the difference between our visit here last year and this year where we've seen the the promise turned into reality where we've got customers who are implementing where we've got businesses who are driving value from the solutions that they're really that they're integrating with the solutions that they've already got and and being able to demonstrate that value really emphasizes the importance and I think will help to continue the momentum that we feel in this market Scott one of the things I want to ask you was obviously the theme at had dude was off loading data warehouses what they do is a benefit there but you have a relationship with Hortonworks and we've had we were talking early with Murph was an analyst at Gartner was talking about the the early adopters and the mainstream getting it now and but there's always a question of value right where's the value because his legacy involved right so the most of the web based companies are going to be cloud they'll be SAS they might have a Greenfield clean sheet of paper to work with on big data but an existing enterprise large financial institutions insurance company or what have you they have legacy technology and they have to but they want Hadoop they want to bring it in when you talk to folks out there what are some of the challenges and opportunities they have with that environment and the technology specifically sure that was like a long question there's a lot of a lot of threads in there I want to really try to hit on a couple of important themes because you know you hear it here I get asked a lot about it you know one of the things that people often say is you know this why are you here this whole Hadoop thing is offloading data warehouses isn't that bad doesn't that bother you and the answer is absolutely not certainly there's some hype around that and you know those some marketing around that but when you really look at the technology and the value of what it brings to the table it's a new technology that really allows us to harness new kinds of data and store those new kinds of data in the native format and you know storing detailed data in the native format really enables the best world-class analytics we've seen this happen for you know as long as my career is in the traditional data space so that's a really good thing the way I view it though is sure will some work load move around the infrastructure from the data warehouse to a Hadoop cluster potentially right and by the way if Hadoop is a great solution for it it should go there all right but at the same time there is more demand than there is supply of technology and what I mean by that is the demand for analytics is so extreme that actually adding this tool to the toolkit gives customers more choice and gives them the opportunity to really catch up with the backlog of things that they've wanted to invest in overtime and then the final point really I view what's happening here as perhaps one of the single largest opportunities for expansion of the role and size and scope of the data warehouse in an enterprise because one of the big things that Hadoop brings to the table is a whole lot of raw material a whole lot more data data that used to be thrown away data that never existed a year ago is now going to be able to capture be captured be stored be refined be analyzed and as companies start to find relationships as companies start to find actionable tidbits from the analytics in this huge source of raw material I think it's actually an opportunity for upside for them to integrate more data into their data warehouse where they can actually do the real-time interaction and streaming that's going to get them to the demonstrable business benefit so it's the modernization of the enterprise it's its modernization the way I look at it is also it's sometimes the word incremental can be it can sound like it we're trying to downplay it but I see it as incremental in that it's different data and it's incremental data it's incremental subject areas its new stuff that's going to come into the environment and based on what we've seen in the history of analytics right that there's no end to the value that companies find and there's no end to competition in their businesses so this is a huge opportunity for the entire community to deliver more analytics and i think that there's actually more upside for traditional legacy data warehouse vendors and there is anything I think that's a really important point because as you said a lot of people think about that offloading workloads but it's also about offloading we're close but bringing in new data doing more analytics and then moving some of that into back into the data warehouse you can actually create more value from it yeah I mean one of the things that I've seen is you know over time and Moore's law is something that's been going on for some time right and and cost erosion in Hardware has been going on for a long time and you think about the thing that you buy today for your bi implementation the hardware costs what twenty percent of what it costs three four years ago and you know what revenues continue to increase because they're such pent-up demand that as it gets less expensive it becomes more consumable and I think the same thing it's really going to continue to happen as we add in these new technologies and these new data types so one of the things I want to commend teradata for doing is focusing on kind of that reference protector and helping customers understand how this new technology of Hadoop and big data fits in with everything else that they're doing talk a little bit a bit about how from a reference architecture and then maybe even from a product perspective how teradata goes about turning this into a reality for enterprise customers who you know really you know they're not looking to just kick the tires of the Duke they want they want to use this for its really support you know applications and workflows they're really you know critical to their business yeah I think you know one of the biggest things that we can do to help the industry and to help our customers really is to define a realistic roadmap that's consumable for them in their enterprise and so while it's certainly easy to have marketing release or press release it says uh this new technology does everything in slices bread it washes your car does all these things in reality there are very few things like that in the world right but the new technologies and the new innovations really do fit into some very interesting new use cases and so by providing this integrated roadmap of how customers can deploy and fit these technologies together is a really great education process and it's been extremely well received by our customers and prospects I have to tell you that even in advance of the announcement of the things that we had here today we've already got customers who have gone down this path with us because it's such a compelling value proposition the other thing is that we don't actually put specific technology in those boxes it's a reference architecture we hope that there's some teradata product in there but at the same time we you know our customers understand that there is choice in the marketplace and the best solution is going to win and by providing this reference architecture I think we helped elevate ourselves to more of a trusted advisor status with with the the industry and in how we see these things fitting together and providing very effective very low-risk kinds of solutions well I think you hit on something that trusted advisor I think companies and enterprises are just crying out for some leadership and to help to help them really understand how they're going to make this a reality in their organizations and you know you mentioned kind of the openness and being you know allowing enterprises shoots a technology that fits that fits the the work case of course you know you hope that stared at in a lot of cases but it could be something else so talk a little bit about your relationship with hortonworks so I know you announced today kind of a reseller agreement you're going to be actually reselling the the subscription service to Hortonworks service offering talk about that a little bit and also I want to dive into the tech as well the Hadoop appliance I mentioned earlier like you announced and maybe just kind of walk us through some of the news to them sure so I mean obviously we have a strategic relationship with Hortonworks and it's our second year here at Summit and it really started with I think a very common view of what's happening in the marketplace and how these technologies should really play well together at the same time we also really believe that it's important that the community embrace the open source Apache version of the software so that it doesn't become fragmented and become obsolete right so Horton is spot-on in terms of business model and putting everything back into the Apache open source version so that means that I think this is the version that will win and this will be the version that companies can count on to be sustainable so i think that there's an advantage there implied so that's said i think it fits into the right place we've got a great engineering relationship and a great common vision on how the enterprise architecture and how the pieces can fit together and be optimized for different workloads for different service levels and for different applications so having that common vision and kind of I think bringing to Best of Breed providers together with Wharton works on the on the Hadoop side and teradata for what we're very well known for I think it's really the best of all worlds and we work together to lay out this reference architecture and so it's not just you know tur data came down from the mountain said this should be your reference architecture we've got some validation we got some validation of use cases and then we went to work from an engineering perspective on how we go build these things out and make them work and optimize them and support them end to end because obviously not only in you know with the all of the new solutions is their kind of a scarcity of talent and some confusion support becomes really really important so one of the things we added to our portfolio we announced today is an expanded relationship on the support side where customers can come to teradata for integrated support of all of their data analytics environments whether it be teradata whether it be asked her whether it be Hadoop with hdb and you know that's a really nice thing where there's one phone number to call we've got fully integrated processes we can help with a global footprint in the 80 countries where we do business and obviously Hortonworks with the with the extreme depth and ability to manage the content of the kernel can get it done unlike anyone else Scott we've been talking enterprise-grade all morning as you did those the theme of the keynote mer from our garden about security compliance I mean these are meat and potatoes enterprise issues right so I got to ask you what's what are you guys looking at what's what's coming next obviously the platform to do has a stabilized developers going to want to program on it in different environments but the reality in the enterprise is a certain requirement so what are you looking at in the labs that's coming around the corner that's it going to be really really important for customers to realize the value of scaling and harnessing the big data of Hadoop with the existing infrastructure yeah I mean I think there are two things that will continue to do one is will look to build out kind of that framework of ecosystem and in all of the keynotes this morning you know everyone talked about the value of the ecosystem and it's amazing the ecosystem how they're just more and more logos this year than there were last year and I think that that will continue but really building out that ecosystem so that those things that are important can be realized and they can be realized in a very repeatable fashion I think in addition to that kind of ease of use right because despite the fact that we have burgeoning numbers of newly minted data scientists and people getting into the marketplace that's really good there still aren't enough and so de-risking things by making them easier to deploy and easier to support i think is a key focus area and then you know finally I said two things but now third you know finally it will say to me I'd all right we'll continue to look at performance and just making sure that we have the best density the best performance the cost performance value proposition that our customers will want because I also continue to believe that the supply of data will outstrip any customers ability to invest in infrastructure I'd love to get your take on want to go back to mention to what you mentioned about the you know the Hadoop distribution focusing on a patchy and moving a patchy compatible so I take that number one to me and Tara day is not going to be coming out with their own Hadoop distribution absolutely not but how do you think about that yeah I think we can say that pretty definitively so but what about how do you see this whole Hadoop market playing out them you've got a Hortonworks Cloudera map are some others how do you see this playing out in the next year or so I mean is this you mentioned you think again that's kind of the open source of patchy versions going to kind of win when do you think that's going to happen you've got some competitors in the market and different business models hot yeah you know there are different business models and different innovators and you know my crystal ball is probably only about as clear as anyone elses but you know kind of for the long term I think it's best for the industry if if it mimics a model similar to the way Linux is deployed where this kind of a duopoly maybe three vendors it's very largely open source there's a lot of portability between I think that really strengthens the position of Hadoop as a tech as a core technology and foundation for some of the things that we're doing and so I would hope that in you know the most successful outcome would be that we'd end up with a duopoly or or you know maybe three kind of providers around a similar colonel because that would that would remove fragmentation from the market by the way I think it you know where we are software company so I think it's fair for companies to have value add proprietary software that's not a bad thing but at the file system level at a core two level I think the open source community cannot be out innovated right and and so I think that that's a really important thing so I think you know hopefully we'll get to that duopoly or maybe three companies that kind of have that I don't know if we will but I sure hope we do and I think the if I were to bet on it I would say it's odds on that that will be the case now will that be 18 months three years five years I don't know Scott thanks for coming inside the cube obviously you guys have a great position in the market place and the enterprise message is straw here that's what the demand is we're seeing a lot of trends out there that want the enterprise grade big data which is not just once there's but Hadoop's a big part of it Thanks coming inside the cube and sharing your perspective and what you got working on certainly having the new products come out to be great so thanks for coming onto the cube this is SiliconANGLE and wiki bonds coverage of hadoop summit we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break you