Speaker 0 | 00:07.597

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, Raj Madan on the show, Chief Digital and Information Technology Officer, and very excited to have you on the show because you have an extensive, extensive career. But I think what’s exciting is that you’ve gone… from big to small. So you’ve seen really, really many different IT environments. You’ve got a lot of, well, as much as you can have nowadays, AI experience. So that’s always nice. So first of all, welcome to the show. I want to talk going big to small, but first, how did you get started in this? this thing that we call technology, which really is like maybe 100 years old.

Speaker 1 | 01:02.768

Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, Phil, thanks for having me on the show. I was super excited to be here and super excited to be talking with you today. So I started my journey with technology, I want to say about, oh gosh, it’s probably been about 35 or so plus years. I remember growing up back home in India and my dad… He came home. He had just traveled to the U.S. He came home with one of these sort of Texas instrument computers that you plug into your TV. You know,

Speaker 0 | 01:36.902

first of all, for all of us ignorant Americans, and I’m not saying all Americans are ignorant. I’m not going to pigeonhole every American into ignorant and being bad at geography or anything. I hope that we know where India is. But India is a very big place. Can you give me? Can you paint a picture of what it was like for you growing up? I mean, I can tell you, I grew up in like a small town, like on a farm, and we were like walking around with hay in our mouth, that type of stuff, you know, and grass stains underneath, that type of thing. But what was it like for you? Where did you grow up? City, country? Well, I mean, I want to feel the picture and flavor of India where you grew up.

Speaker 1 | 02:12.637

Yeah, so I grew up on the eastern side of India in a town called Kolkata, or as the British used to call it. Calcutta. So it’s on the eastern side.

Speaker 0 | 02:22.541

Calcutta, yeah. Let’s not butcher all these things. Yes.

Speaker 1 | 02:26.604

It’s very close to another country, Bangladesh. So I would say Bangladesh is probably the closest country to Calcutta. A little bit about me growing up. My dad, he moved there. He moved from the northern part of India from a state called Punjab. And, you know, he grew up in a town called Amritsar, which is sort of the religious capital for Sikhs all over the world. And he moved from there to Calcutta, set up his business there along with his dad. And my dad was he was academically and entrepreneurially very astute. So went to one of the top engineering schools in India called the Indian Institute of Technology. You know, I think they. They barely graduate a few hundred to a couple thousand people a year, got his degree in engineering and started his business. And having spent the first 18 years of my life in Calcutta, what I would say is we came from a small to mid-sized family. We were… It was my parents. We were three siblings, so three boys at home. Seeing my mom deal with her three sons and my dad and keep the family together, and she was the glue of the family, that was impressive in and of itself. And my dad, on the other hand, he was one of my biggest… or one of my sort of favorite stories about my dad was that he ended up, you know, I tried my hardest to sort of learn math and to get good at math. And I wasn’t good sort of initially, you know, in math.

Speaker 0 | 04:29.707

Like engineering level math.

Speaker 1 | 04:31.508

Like engineering level math.

Speaker 0 | 04:32.629

Like super nerd level.

Speaker 1 | 04:34.150

Like super nerd level math.

Speaker 0 | 04:35.371

Yeah, my dad was a math major, so I was clearly a failure. Clearly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 04:40.855

So, you know, I… And my dad loved this. He would not go to bed unless he had solved every problem that was on his plate. And he was a true problem solver. And I remember giving him this math problem one night before I went to bed. And I said, Dad… Like, I don’t know how to figure this math problem out. And he was like, hmm, okay. Like, you know, let’s sleep on it. And at 6 a.m. the next morning, he’s like. It’s blue money,

Speaker 0 | 05:08.975

but he can’t go to bed without, he can’t go to bed without solving a problem. And he’s telling me to sleep on it.

Speaker 1 | 05:12.999

So he goes to bed. So he goes to bed. At 3 a.m. he, like, wakes my mom up. And he’s like, he’s like, honey, can you get me a piece of paper and a pen? I think I’ve, I think I’ve figured out this math problem. So, you know, my mom’s irritated at 3 in the morning. She’s like. Can I please sleep? So he finally like gets up on his own, gets this like piece of paper and he starts to like write out the solution for it. And 6 a.m. in the morning. And, you know, you know, no kid wants to be woken up at 6 a.m. in the morning, knocks on, you know, on the door. And he’s like, he’s like, look, like, I want you to like, here’s a solution. I woke up at 3 in the morning and I solved it for you. And I think there’s there’s so much to be sort of learned in that. in that story, right? Which was like, no challenge is sort of big enough. And if you put your heart and mind to it, you can actually sort of solve it. And he was a great role model for that. And he still continues to be a great, you know, great role model for that.

Speaker 0 | 06:10.891

There’s also, do you find yourself waking up at three o’clock in the morning, though, as I guess, because there’s a certain genetic aspect to that as well.

Speaker 1 | 06:17.775

You know, I, I luckily sleep well through the night, and I don’t wake up at three in the morning. But You know, I try to solve all my problems before I go to bed. But, but, but, you know, no, I think, you know, I think the other thing that I learned from him, which was interesting was, he, he, he, he went to Denmark, you know, when I was a kid, and he wanted, he was setting up his factory, and he wanted to import this machine from Denmark. And he ended up like importing this machine from Denmark took a five year loan in importing this machine from Denmark. And Um, you know, he’s, he, he started his business. Um, he used to, he used to sort of sacrifice by like, we used to go out maybe to a restaurant once in a while. And my dad never, you know, ordered anything, uh, big and elaborate at the restaurant. He never even got soda at those restaurants. He was like, I’ll just drink my water and I’ll be fine. And I think it, and he ended up sort of paying this loan off before. It was actually due. So he paid it before sort of the five-year term. And it taught me this sort of sense of, first of all, it taught me the ability to sort of sacrifice for the greater good, which is, you know, I’m going to make sacrifices and pay off this loan so that my family can have sort of the luxuries in their life, right? Like he didn’t want to drink the soda, but he encouraged us to sort of do whatever we wanted to do. And In that process, he sacrificed for the greater good. And I think the other thing that he ended up getting rewarded for when he paid the loan off a little bit in advance of the five years, the government, who he actually took the loan from, ended up giving him a reward. They actually gave him 1.5% or 2% of the loan amount actually back because they said, no one actually pays a loan off in advance. And you’ve been one of the first people that have done that. And that… taught me this notion of sort of honesty and integrity, right? Which is, if you do the right thing, you know, you pay your dues off to people, you actually get rewarded for it. So there’s a lot of sort of interesting values that my dad sort of built over the years through some of his actions, obviously, this notion of like, solving problems, sacrificing for the greater good, you know, being honest, being ethical about everything that you do. And the last thing was, Going back to your question about what was the environment that we grew up in, India tends to be quite academically competitive, let’s say. There’s a lot of people, not enough colleges, not enough universities, and all of that. We had a little bit of an interesting… My dad was pro-education. He wanted to do everything he could. He paid for my education when I first came to the US. He really wanted to make sure that we got educated. And there was this internal competition between my three brothers around who would be the most educated. And, you know, while I got my sort of master’s degree and I got two master’s degrees, I have like a youngest brother went to MIT, then went to Harvard. And so there was this sense of education that we had as a family. And it was sort of in a way it was this like healthy competition. And that was another value that sort of. of came from my dad. But going back to my mom for a second, I mean, she was the glue. She kept the family together and she made sure that the family was in perfect harmony. And I give her a lot of credit to sort of do that with… three sons and my and you know her husband and i think that was like that was wow i don’t know how she did that there’s actually so many pieces to the story that are very very valuable that you may not that sometimes you

Speaker 0 | 10:15.941

may not even think about but one was just the aspect of a family to begin with just because the family that the family the concept of family or the organization of the family It’s quite a bit under attack these days. And it’s just that entire ecosystem, I guess, of a family and working off each other and mom keeping everyone together and learning from dad and having dad be a role model for what he did and seeing how he sacrificed. There’s so much to that. Um, just that aspect alone is so important. So, um, outstanding. And so you had to, to, to get over here and to get where you are at. Did you, was that, did dad help you do that? Or did you have to, I don’t know, uh, apply and get into college over here? Or what was that? Um, what was that struggle? And I know how it can be because my son-in-law is from, from Yemen, which is a ridiculously poor. country i don’t know what’s harder to get from yemen to the united states or from india the united states and be you know from a competitive standpoint he’s an engineer and his brother’s an engineer and they had a very similar very similar aspect you know father sacrificing for the family very competitive together always always at the top of each other’s class at the top of every you know like it was like they were at the top of the class so then it was just it wasn’t just a competition between them it was like well it was a competition between them at the end and it was just they’re both always always at the top so and now you know his brother has a phd and he had a master’s and just ended up getting a job before before getting his phd but you know i kind of understand that dynamic but there had there has to be more to that story of how you ended up getting over here too yeah i’d also like to know should you leave and go back to india and what should we do because you know i mean india is uh i mean a massive and up and coming i’m just you curious. I don’t know any of that dynamic. So it’s just come into my mind right now, thinking about this.

Speaker 1 | 12:25.861

Yeah. So I would say there’s a few aspects to unpack there. I think, first of all, how did I get here? So it’s actually not too different than I think how most individuals here actually get into college. So you had to take your SATs. I mean, I remember taking my SATs a couple of times, applying for college. And you go through that decision-making process as to which college do you want to sort of go to, which one’s giving you sort of the best scholarship, which one’s like got the best job prospects after you become an engineer and all of that good stuff, right? And I think one of the interesting things, even before I sort of came here for colleges, there was this big debate that sort of happened at home. I told my dad I wanted to become a computer scientist. And he said, no, no, no. You know, there’s… there’s a big difference between a computer scientist and a computer engineer. And he literally had, I don’t know, five or six of his friends, like, you know, come and see me and spend tons of time with me sort of explaining the difference between a scientist and an engineer. He’s like, you know, engineers have the right sort of, you know, foundation, like they have a, you know, bigger array of problem solving skills and all of that. And finally convinced me that I needed to be an engineer and not a computer scientist. And And I’m actually glad he did that because it’s sort of, you know, no knock on computer scientists, let’s say, but I got this sort of really broad base of problem solving skills that maybe I would not have gotten if I would have become sort of a computer scientist, right? Because I would have focused more on sort of programming and coding and all that good stuff, right? So I think he, you know, I’m actually glad he sort of… pushed me in that direction a little bit. And he coached me sort of become this, become an engineer versus becoming sort of a scientist and, uh, you know, nothing wrong with either one of the two, but, but I’m actually glad that I sort of went down that path, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 14:31.405

This is great. Cause it’s all coming together now. It’s, it’s leading to a road of, of questions that I’m going to ask you here. I, I, I promise. And this is all going to make sense to everyone out there listening. It’s going to make sense the, cause you also have an MBA. So, which really has. I mean, you could say it has something to do with engineering, but not really. So then you’ve got the MBA as also, so you’ve got this kind of this pedigree of, I don’t know. from India, engineer, math nerd, fitting all of the fitting all the stereotypes and now MBA on top of it, you know, hard working. It’s just you fit all the great stereotypes. It’s like, you know, like, yes, please. Yes, I will. I will take all of those. And then, you know, major, I guess, global head of digital solutions, commercial it at Novartis. I mean, just a small pharmaceutical company, not big at all. Really don’t do much out there. I think they’ve got one drug. And so that was pretty significant. And I’m sure there’s a whole long story that we could talk for two days on how you got to there. But eventually you got to there. And what was it like working in a very large organization? Was it very systematic? Was it like, what was it like at enterprise level?

Speaker 1 | 15:55.317

Yeah. So I think before we go there, let me just, you know, I think it’s important.

Speaker 0 | 15:59.220

We’ll go wherever you want. I don’t care. I’m just, I just asked it. You just go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 16:02.922

I think it’s important to sort of talk through, you mentioned a couple of things there about the MBA and you mentioned sort of the transition away from a cosmetic company to a pharmaceutical company. And I think those were important pivots in my life as well. So I think on one hand.

Speaker 0 | 16:19.133

L’Oreal, small company also. No one knows who they are. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 16:23.256

no one knows who they are. So I think. One of the things that I realized quite early in my career was, while I was really passionate about technology and really passionate about engineering, that I was even more passionate about sort of applying technology to the right problem. And I think that’s why I went sort of…

Speaker 0 | 16:41.427

For a second there, I thought you were going to say people, and I was like, that can’t go hand in hand with engineering. Yeah. I was like, no, I’m solving problems still. Go. Something tells me you’re good with people. I just thought you were going to say that. No, you can’t. Engineering won. Engineering comes first, people second.

Speaker 1 | 17:02.144

Go. Yeah. And I think that there was this aspect of like, as an engineer, I quickly realized that I really love to solve problems, even if they were the wrong problems, right?

Speaker 0 | 17:14.007

Oh, yes. Oh, it’s so true. We’re going to fix this issue, even though it has nothing to do with the direction of the company. Go.

Speaker 1 | 17:22.749

Exactly. And I think that that’s where the MBA was really helpful because it was like,

Speaker 0 | 17:27.823

thank you. You know,

Speaker 1 | 17:28.723

you know, there’s this famous quote from Einstein that says, if I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes actually solving, solving the problem. Right. And I think that’s a big, and you know, Einstein is perhaps the greatest engineer that, that ever lived. Right. And, and I think he, he sort of, he sort of thought about this as, you know, The solution, you need to spend very little time on the solution. You actually need to spend the majority of the time, over 90% of the time, actually thinking about the problem, right? And I think that’s the aha moment that I had when I went and got my MBA, which is like, how do I connect all of this great technology to the right business problems that are in front of us that my company needs or our patients need or our consumers need us to solve for, right? So I think that was the big sort of aha moment. I think the other piece around sort of making this shift to the pharma industry, which is important, is unfortunately about the time when I was, you know, I was actually doing quite well at L’Oreal, but my mom got diagnosed with brain cancer and lymphoma at the same time, which is like extremely, extremely rare. And I sort of asked myself the question, I said, look, what am I doing with my time? Am I going to be sort of selling lipstick the rest of my life? Or do I really want to have a bigger… purpose. And that really got me to sort of take a step back, define my purpose, define like what I wanted to do. That’s when I sort of made that shift from a beauty company to Novartis. That’s very helpful.

Speaker 0 | 19:08.201

That’s very helpful. So that’s very, very important for other people out there listening. I think it’s very important for people out there listening because a lot of people are just going through the motions. We get a job. We have to have a job. We got to put food on the table. What do you do after you graduate? You got to get a job. Well, why wait? And I’m not saying that it’s not things that happen to us in our lives. And I’m sorry to hear that about your mother. I’m sorry. But we don’t necessarily have to wait for something to happen for us to say, hey, I need to live a life on purpose. So anyways, you made the jump and how did that affect you?

Speaker 1 | 19:48.595

Yeah, I think on one hand, you know, I think I was starting to get closer and closer to living my purpose. So I think that was sort of a positive. On the other hand, I think, and I quite openly sort of say this, that my time at Novartis was perhaps my biggest failure and my biggest learning moment. I went from a company that was extremely entrepreneurial. I mean, think of a beauty company, thrives on innovation, creativity, very decentralized in its approach. Their previous CEO used to say, we’re a company that thrives on organized chaos. To a company that is very regulated, Swiss-German, very operationally astute. Think of being in Switzerland. I mean, trains leave on time. And this is a company. there isn’t room for failure. This is a company that thrives on getting things done and executing and being an execution powerhouse, let’s say, and operationally extremely diligent in how it operationalizes every process, every technology, and every function in every department. Right. So, I took my L’Oreal playbook and I thought I could apply it at Novartis. And it did not work. It was not supposed to work. Very different culture. Nothing wrong with either one of those two cultures. Both amazing companies. Both do really well at what they do.

Speaker 0 | 21:41.958

Crazy curious. I mean, you have a really good knack for creating curiosity. Maybe you should be in marketing. I mean, really. Because I’m really curious as to what the playbook is at. organized chaos. What was your playbook at L’Oreal that didn’t work at Novartis? I got to know. I’m just so curious. You can be like, well, Phil, you can enter your email here and I’ll send you the document. I mean, I just got to know. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 22:13.093

I think the playbook at L’Oreal was we continuously experiment and we continuously learn from those experiments with a mindset that a lot of these experiments are actually not going to work. And the playbook from a technology perspective at Novartis was, yes, we want to invest in these technologies, but let’s sit down and let’s assess whether this is the right technology for us. Let’s compare and contrast it to a bunch of other technologies. You know, it was a very consensus-based organization.

Speaker 0 | 22:52.880

More the Einstein approach, more the… I think Lincoln also said it, I can’t remember if he’s the first person that said it, but if I had to chop down a tree, I would spend the first, I don’t know, 95% of the time sharpening the saw.

Speaker 1 | 23:07.777

Yeah. Yeah. And that was the Novartis approach, which again, makes a lot of sense, but two very different approaches, right? One sort of a strategy that is driven by experimentation and learning from those experiments. And at Novartis, it was a strategy that was driven by sharpening the saw, thinking about the problem statement, really doing all the due diligence up front.

Speaker 0 | 23:35.970

So again, great at creating a lot of curiosity. If you’d like to share, I would love to know your biggest failure. I would love to know your biggest failure that you learned from, because you said I failed, or you said, you know, there was a big learning experience there. And that’s really, I am Phil Howard. I am a, I am really a product of failure after failure, after failure. That is exactly, I have learned everything the hard way. And I try to tell my kids this, you know, you don’t have to learn everything the hard way. Like I did, you could probably just take my advice and probably know a lot.

Speaker 1 | 24:12.314

So I think my biggest sort of

Speaker 0 | 24:17.434

learning there was that to contextualize change to contextualize and you know a lot of what we do in the technology world is what does that mean to a fifth grader explain that to a fifth grader i need to know we’re going to dumb that down for fifth grade in the language yeah

Speaker 1 | 24:34.863

so how do you get an organization that’s 120 000 people to move the needle on technology on digital on data and analytics and really harness the power of that technology. That requires a huge amount of change in an organization that is… for no fault of its own, it’s used to doing things a very different way.

Speaker 0 | 25:02.294

Or the same way, or just the way it’s always been.

Speaker 1 | 25:04.656

The way it’s always been. And it’s like turning a ship, a huge ship, in a different direction.

Speaker 0 | 25:13.542

Yep.

Speaker 1 | 25:14.463

And to do that, you have to really understand and respect and honor and start with how that organization actually works before you can change it.

Speaker 0 | 25:27.756

There’s real leadership there.

Speaker 1 | 25:29.937

Yeah. And I think that that was my failure. That was my learning moment, which is to say, I’m not going to get any buy-in if I take what I’ve done previously in a very different cultural setting and try to apply that here because it’s a different organization. It operates completely differently. People here think very differently. They work very differently. So. the first thing I should have done was just sort of sat down for the first, not sat down, but sort of learned about the organization and what people have done successfully and not done successfully. It sort of goes back to your point about imparting knowledge to your kids, right? I should have listened to someone like you who has the battle scars, has sort of been through that failure and knows what’s going to work and what’s not going to work without. Without giving up my ambition for change, though.

Speaker 0 | 26:29.468

Exactly. So moving then from a large organization to a small organization, the benefit that you probably got from that, that’s similar. So there’s things that are similar and there’s things that are dissimilar. But I would imagine that one thing that would be very similar would be constraints and having to work within certain rules or, I don’t know, constraints, certain constraints. And you’ve mentioned that sometimes, and I do completely agree with this, because I do believe niching down and less is more often, less is often more, that constraints and working within certain constraints can spark innovation. And can you give me some examples?

Speaker 1 | 27:20.492

So I think one of the things that, and this is where I wanted to sort of maybe highlight. some of the things we do at my current organization, because we are an organization of 300 people. So compare that to a company of over 100,000.

Speaker 0 | 27:36.025

It’s just insane. It’s an insane difference.

Speaker 1 | 27:39.048

Think about our budgets, think about our, our financial constraints, our human resource constraints, you know, our capacity constraints, however you want to think about it.

Speaker 0 | 27:53.288

Every dollar is worth more, really. I mean, every little mistake creates a larger reverberation than, yes.

Speaker 1 | 28:03.132

And, you know, the way we sort of thought about that was we said, look, I think we want to eliminate unnecessary wastage within the organization. We want to be as modern and productive as an organization as we can be. which ultimately benefits our shareholders, but very importantly, benefits our patients, because we get a sense of speed there. And I’ll go into sort of how we do a lot of this, and makes our employees a lot more sort of satisfied, a lot more empowered. And we created, you know, we have sort of these 12 or 13 operating principles. And we sort of asked ourselves, like, How do we want to run this company in a way where we are going to be able to work around some of the constraints that we have and not only survive but thrive in the way we operate ourselves as a company? And I’ll give you a few of sort of our principles around that. First of all, one of my favorite principles is around results matter more than activity. So I have been at many organizations that reward you for activity, but do not reward you for outcomes and for results. And honestly, we don’t care how many hours a week you work. Clearly, if you work a little too much, we do get concerned. But if you think you can deliver on outcomes or you can deliver on all of your outcomes by sort of working. Less than 40 hours a week, more power to you. So we are outcome and results focused. We are not a company that wants to measure you by activity. And I think that’s really important. Like think of our sales reps, right? We don’t care if our sales reps, you know, how many doctors they go speak to, how many calls they make on a daily basis. We empower them to sort of think about that. Ultimately, what we care about is, are they able to get more and more patients to use our drug? Because we believe our drug is more efficacious, you know. has higher efficacy and has higher safety, let’s say, right? So we’re ultimately driven by sort of outcome and not driven by activity, let’s say, right?

Speaker 0 | 30:33.333

It is important. And when you mentioned sales, it’s a numbers game. It’s absolutely a numbers game. I think a lot of organizations get lost saying, focus on the activity, the activity, the activity. I myself have said, focus on the activity. I myself have said, focus on the activity, because… numbers matter and activity i think people say focus on activity a lot because it takes the emotion out of the game so to speak but clearly more focused more laser focused activity is going to generate better results yep because you could just be you knocking on a bunch of lawyers doors and not doctor’s offices doors. And you could say, I’m doing activity, I’m doing activity, I’m doing activity, but you’re knocking on the wrong doors. I mean, I don’t know if we really have pharmaceutical reps knocking on doors anymore. I mean, I come from a family of doctors, so I’ve known plenty of pharmaceutical reps in the day. And I’ve got plenty that have taken my dad, that have, you know, I just, my dad’s urologist and everyone in my family’s, a lot of people in my family are doctors. So I know the… I know how the environment has changed over time, especially in the 80s and 90s. Pharmaceutical reps were a big difference. So, okay. So then from an IT perspective, then what are you doing? What can IT do? What does this have to do with IT at all and IT leadership? And how are you involved in that? I mean, we just mentioned sales. We mentioned leadership. We mentioned activity and results. But the IT guy just keeps blinking lights. on and hides in the server room, so to speak, doesn’t really need to have a PhD in engineering and an MBA, or I guess you do now. Do you or do you not? Or do we just care about results?

Speaker 1 | 32:26.655

Yeah. So I think there’s a few implications from an IT perspective. I think one of them is, and as we look to drive more and more efficiency within the organization, one of our other really big sort of… Yeah. operating principles is around being data driven. I think we’ve all made decisions without the right data. So we don’t want to be an organization that is driven by opinion that is not founded in data. And going back to your sort of point around making sure that Our sales reps, for instance, let’s just take that one as an example, are targeting the right doctors. That’s a data-driven decision. And one of the things that I’m quite passionate about is providing the right data and the right insights to the organization so that we are not making decisions based on opinions, we’re making decisions based on data. And I think that’s one of the big roles that I play within the organization. And that’s one of the big roles that my team plays because it’s really important for us to be very data driven.

Speaker 0 | 33:50.257

Can you give me an example that with a potential tool or something very hands on and specific that would be helpful to the audience?

Speaker 1 | 33:59.019

Yeah. So let me give you one really sort of interesting example, which is. You know, in the pharma business, you often, or sort of historically, I would say what’s been done is you go target doctors that are what are called the highest decile doctors. And these are doctors that are likely the ones that are going to write the most scripts or the most prescriptions, let’s say, for your product. Now, that approach makes sense, right? You go speak to doctors that are going to write the most number of prescriptions for you. And hopefully they’ll write the most number of prescriptions for you because they have the biggest volume of patients coming through their door. And that’s going to ultimately drive sales for your organization. However, if you think about that for a second, you might have doctors that are already writing the most number of prescriptions for you. you don’t even need to have conversations with because they already know that you have a superior product and they’re already believers in your product. They’re already going to be writing the most number of prescriptions they can about your product, whether you go talk to them or you don’t go talk to them. So why spend energy with these doctors? Now that sounds very counterintuitive, right? It’s like, it’s the uncomfortable thing to do, but… You don’t have to do that. You don’t have to go spend time with them. And what that might mean is, okay, maybe we go spend time with doctors that don’t believe in the product yet.

Speaker 0 | 35:36.199

And you should bring the other doctor with you when you go speak to those guys.

Speaker 1 | 35:40.681

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 35:41.141

That’s another thing. Maybe it’s have the other doctor give a talk at the next conference from a biopharmaceutical agnostic point of view. I don’t know. However you say that, you know. Okay, keep going.

Speaker 1 | 35:57.451

Yeah, so I think that’s a very sort of counterintuitive example of how you use limited resources.

Speaker 0 | 36:07.043

But where does IT come into play? What are we handing that? What do we do? Give them the numbers? Hey, this guy’s already prescribed. Stop wasting time with him. Go to these guys. Or these guys have the largest affinity to what? Okay, so what program are we using? What are we doing? How are we crunching these numbers? Is there anything? Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 36:22.461

so there’s two.

Speaker 0 | 36:22.981

Are we writing some Python code or something? What are we doing? Chat GBT?

Speaker 1 | 36:26.703

Yeah, so there’s models you can build. There’s sort of a genre of models called next best action, right? So what is the next best action that a sales rep should take with that specific doctor? And this is where the use of sort of machine learning, artificial intelligence, I’ll spare some of the technical details behind it sort of comes into play, which says, this is how our data is, or this is what our data is telling us in terms of how you should go target this doctor or maybe not even target them.

Speaker 0 | 36:59.243

I want this for the show. Like, I want to apply this to the show. Where’s the next best guest to have on Dice 13 Popularity Nerds? What’s the next best action for Phil Howard to take for the show? That’d be great.

Speaker 1 | 37:09.274

what’s the outcome that you’re looking to sort of maximize?

Speaker 0 | 37:12.435

That’s a great question. We got to sit around and talk about that for 95% of the time and figure out what the problem is. We don’t have time for that right now. But yeah, we can’t do that in another time.

Speaker 1 | 37:21.721

But that’s where I would start.

Speaker 0 | 37:22.541

There’s a lot. I mean, there’s a lot. Yeah, we want to focus on mid-market IT leadership and helping IT leaders do more with less because they get pigeonholed into a cost center and we want to break down the cost center and have upper management teach. IT directors how to flip the script and make it not a cost center anymore and make IT into a business force multiplier and a business force, right? That’s what we want to do. And that’s where you’re at right now, sitting in a mid-market IT company. So that’s why we’re talking. So we need more of you.

Speaker 1 | 37:54.884

Yeah. So I think that…

Speaker 0 | 37:56.445

Let me put that model together. Oh, and then we want to find a way to the Nesbitt. We want to find a way to pay for all of this since it’s just costing me money right now. So… Who should I go to to ask for money to advertise on this show? And yeah, then there’s an SEO component to it. Then there’s a web redesign. Let’s see, what else do I have on my plate right now? There’s the book. Who do we send the book to? Should we put it on Amazon? Should we do a hardcover? Should we do an audio version? And then is that a waste of my time? I don’t know. We need an AI market. We need that.

Speaker 1 | 38:30.892

And why do you think people are going to pay for this show?

Speaker 0 | 38:34.094

I don’t think they’re going to pay for the show. I think the show is going to always be free, but I think that people that want to sell you stuff should pay to advertise on this show. I don’t know. Who was the last sales guy that contacted you or is in your LinkedIn inbox or saying, I need five minutes on your calendar right now? There’s got to be somebody. Who called you the most this week? Who was it? Ring Central? Who was it?

Speaker 1 | 38:55.068

The problem is I don’t remember who it was because I tend to ignore that most of the time.

Speaker 0 | 38:59.832

There’s the next problem. So we solved that one too. So, and then you won’t ignore them though. If all of a sudden now here’s our commercial break on dissecting popular it nerds are listening to this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And guess what? Special guest or whoever you could be in that spot right here, right now. And all those people that can’t get Raj’s attention, you could be speaking right now to all of them on this little commercial break. That’s going to happen someday right now. So yes. Um, yeah, I don’t know. And, and they, he doesn’t even know who you are. He doesn’t even care. He ignores you. How does that feel? You’re just a number. You’re just that activity. You’re just that activity that’s completely pointless and we need results. We need results, okay? And you’re failing. So that’s a message to all you people out there that could be advertising on dissecting popularized deterrents right now. We don’t even know if you’re hearing this. There’s the second problem, Raj, that we need to solve is how do we get all those people that need to be hearing the show that’d be like, we need to be on this show because Raj is on there. We can’t get him to answer our phone. Anyways, there’s my, sorry, I just went off on a tangent there. That’s how it happens to me. So I don’t know. Does that give you a peek into my world? Maybe you should come over here, do some pro bono work. We need the VP from Novartis doing some of the IT work over here at Dice Like a Puppet or IT Nerds. I think that would give us a bump. I do. I really do. I think it would give us a bump. And then we could play off all of those stereotypes of really smart people from India as well. That would be the next thing we would play on. Okay. Okay. So there’s models and we just got, I guess, hired. data IT people? I don’t know. What’s your solution? What’s on the roadmap?

Speaker 1 | 40:44.822

Yeah. So I think, look, I think it’s not that there’s only models. I think that there’s a lot that actually goes into sort of getting these models to work, right? I mean, building the models, I actually think is the easy part. That’s what the engineer in me can do. But making sure that you have the right data to actually train the models with So that the models give you the right outputs and have an extremely low hallucination rate. Let me define what hallucination rate is. So a lot of these like generative AI tools out there today, they have, you know, let’s say 95% accuracy, right? But 5% of what they actually produce are called hallucinations because they’re actually not proper results. They’re giving you false information, misinformation.

Speaker 0 | 41:37.632

Hallucination rate. We do have a dictionary coming out. We have the Dissecting Popular IT Nerds dictionary coming out soon where we’re using AI to scrub all of these different, I don’t know, terminologies. Hallucination rate. It’s got to go on there.

Speaker 1 | 41:51.118

Yeah. And if you don’t have the right data with the right, you don’t have the right data quality, the right data curation done on it with the data sort of linked together and collated with the right. sort of principles around data biases applied to it as well, you’re going to get models that are not going to be completely accurate. And then people are not going to trust those models, right? So there’s a lot of work that actually goes into sort of building trust in these models and making sure that you’re using the right data sets and the right, you know, you think about how you connect these data sets together, how you remove biases in these data sets and all that good stuff, right? And now you have your model. But guess what? A lot of people don’t want to use the models because they’re used to doing things the old way. And I think that’s where IT is not only about the technology piece. IT is about how do you drive a cultural shift within an organization? And unless you get people to sort of see the value in the insights that these AI models are producing, they’re… They’re just nice, pretty models sitting on the shelf. And they’re not going to have the adoption rates that you need. So this is where it’s a minds and hearts game.

Speaker 0 | 43:12.087

Let’s end with this. Where do you begin? You’re an IT director in a mid-market company. You’ve probably got pools of data. Might not necessarily need to go to Snowflake or whatever it’s called to buy data. Might have enough data. Might have years and years of data, manufacturing data, customer data, all this stuff. and you know that there’s some golden nugget there, where do you begin?

Speaker 1 | 43:36.226

Well, you actually don’t start looking at the data first. You start defining what’s the problem that you’re looking to solve. And then what data sets are actually going to help you solve that problem. And then you ask yourself the question, what data sets do I have? And what data sets do I have to procure to help me solve for that specific use case or that specific problem? So again, it goes back to the problem definition. You could have all the data in the world, but if it’s not data that’s going to help you solve the problem, it’s useless.

Speaker 0 | 44:12.913

It’s pretty mind-blowing. I think we need to stop there. It’s been a pleasure having you on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Really, really awesome. Thank you so much for being on the show. We need to continue this conversation. Because what the problem is, the data sets, and then where to get the other data sets is really that. That there is, I mean, it’s life altering from the aspect of really creating career change and growth from a, I guess, business standpoint. and numerous other things. I mean, it can apply to everything. It’s just, it’s very, very big. So thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been a pleasure.

Speaker 1 | 44:51.884

Absolutely. Happy to be here and happy to come back anytime.