Speaker 0 | 00:06.861

Welcome back, everyone, to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m your host, Doug Kameen, and today I’m talking with Kenny Mulliken, CIO at Paragon Films in Oklahoma. Welcome to the show, Kenny.

Speaker 1 | 00:18.090

Hi, Doug. How’s it going?

Speaker 0 | 00:19.611

I’m doing great. How about you?

Speaker 1 | 00:21.473

Doing fine. It’s a good Friday.

Speaker 0 | 00:23.735

Yeah, absolutely. So, Oklahoma, this is a new one for me, my first… my first person to interview and talk to from the Midwest. Where exactly in Oklahoma are you?

Speaker 1 | 00:33.803

Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s kind of the northeast part of the state.

Speaker 0 | 00:38.287

Now, Tulsa is another company. So, you know, you work for Paragon Films. And I’m going to get to that in just a second. But I think I noticed that Paragon, is it based in Broken Arrow? Is that what it said?

Speaker 1 | 00:50.257

Yeah, that’s right. Broken Arrow is a suburb of Tulsa.

Speaker 0 | 00:53.159

Okay. All right. Now, total side, I have somebody from where I’m from here. from the upstate New York area, she was, I think, the CEO of our Chamber of Commerce, and now she’s the CEO of the Chamber of Commerce in Broken Arrow. So there’s like this random connection between the two of us here. It’s like we’re brothers, right? So in all seriousness, you’re a CIO of Paragon Films, and you’ve been there for quite a while. If I was reading on… I’m doing the research here on your LinkedIn profile to give me a cheat sheet, but how long have you been there?

Speaker 1 | 01:32.459

Yeah, so I just passed 11 years as CIO of Paragon Films. And I probably should interject and let the audience know what Paragon Films is because when people hear that, the first thing they’re going to think is, oh, it’s a movie company.

Speaker 0 | 01:45.209

That’s exactly what I did.

Speaker 1 | 01:47.431

That’s what people do all the time. They say, so what kind of movies are you making in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma? They do actually make a few movies here like they do everywhere. But for us, Paragon Films, films is stretch film. So if you can imagine like glad cling wrap for your kitchen, that plastic wrap that you wrap around something, except great big rolls of it for wrapping boxes on pallets for shipping. So that’s what keeps the boxes from falling off the pallet, keeps it all steady on the truck or on a plane or that kind of thing. We make several hundred million pounds a year of this plastic wrap. But it’s cool. We call it stretch film. So that’s the period on films.

Speaker 0 | 02:28.690

You’re stealing my jokes, man. I was going to make a film joke.

Speaker 1 | 02:32.211

Oh, no. You know, well, I thought often that it would be good. I mean, I love my job. Don’t get me wrong. And manufacturing is very interesting. But I want to have an elevator pitch where it is a film company. It is a movie company. And we make like kung fu movies or something like that. I’m going to make up a whole spiel that I give.

Speaker 0 | 02:52.600

you know when i’m on a trip and be a little more entertaining it used to be like i don’t know if you ever see the tv show uh like how i met your mother but yeah one of the main characters uh is a barney stinson and he constantly makes up things about the stuff that he’s doing so he’ll show up to tell some some woman that he’s he’s with snassa the secret nasa yeah that’s exactly so so i the your time at paraguay you’ve I think this is going to be a great thing to talk about with you and to share with our listeners. You’ve been in the position for a long time. I mentioned you’ve just passed 11 years. So you have a lot of tenure. You’ve seen a lot of change in one position. You haven’t moved from spot to spot. And so you’ve been able to ride that change as it’s kind of come along in the last decade. What can you tell us a little bit about being a leader? through that change and maybe even a leader in the manufacturing space too, which, you know, which has its own unique challenges.

Speaker 1 | 03:53.937

Sure. So, you know, for a lot of people, growth in their career means moving up a corporate ladder, either moving up within a company where you go from one position to the next up position, the next higher position. But in a company like, like mine, where I already, the first job that I got when I came into it was the CIO, there wasn’t really anywhere higher to go from an IT perspective. So for me, growth has to come in different ways other than being promoted up to a different level. It comes in the way of a couple of different things. One is what I learn and the way that I grow and expand what I can bring to my company. And the other is that as the company itself grows, my role grows along with it. So when I joined the company 11 years ago, it was owned by the individual, the family that had started the company back in the late 1980s. And. After about four years of being there, he sold to a private equity group. So that’s a big change going from a sole proprietorship, a family-owned business, to being owned by private equity. The kind of decisions that are made, the way that you think about profits, it’s just very different. And after about two years, that private equity group had gotten what they wanted out of it, sold it to another private equity group. And so then you’ve got the shift of what are those needs like? What kind of things are they expecting? And a couple of years later, sold to another private equity group. So I’m actually on the fourth owner of the company within the 11 years that I’ve been there. And each time it’s a little different. The private equity group, Roan Capital, that owns us now, they specialize in helping take European companies. to expand into the U.S. or into the Americas or American company to expand into Europe. So that’s something that we can look forward to at some point is that we would like to acquire companies or grow and build facilities in Europe. And so that’s another way that I can grow is from being a CIO of a company that is only having locations in the U.S. to being a multinational company. And maybe at some point, They may sell us again, or we may become public. That would be another thing. And then I could be a CIO of a publicly traded company, and that would have its own growth opportunities and challenges.

Speaker 0 | 06:15.170

Yeah, sometimes the balance on that, being a public company, has its own challenges, even though there is a ton of opportunity in doing so as well. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 06:23.275

yeah. I don’t know how much I would look forward to that, but all challenges bring growth.

Speaker 2 | 06:30.220

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Speaker 1 | 09:13.433

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Speaker 2 | 09:14.453

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Speaker 0 | 09:19.415

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Speaker 1 | 09:22.798

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Speaker 0 | 09:26.562

So during your tenure, you mentioned that you’ve transitioned through a series of different owners. What’s the growth trajectory been like? And how have you managed to grow your, you talked about growing your own experiences, but growing your team too?

Speaker 1 | 09:41.190

Right. So it’s been very incremental. It hasn’t been like massive growth. Like I have been in companies before that were growing very quickly and we were adding 5, 10, 50%, 100% of the team year on year. And it’s been much slower than that. But the biggest difference was when I came into the company, a lot of the systems that were in place had been there for 10, 20, 25 years. And And kudos to the CIO before me for getting so much value and use out of a system for that long. But at some point, there’s a diminishing return to still using a system that was developed in the early 1990s, and you’re still using that after 2010. So my first job that I had to accomplish was to get us onto modern systems, moving from an on-prem, many computer-based AS400 type system onto Windows-based servers and Microsoft Stack. There was a lot of work to be done there. But what also came along with that was that some of the people on the IT team that had been supporting that legacy equipment and software for so long didn’t necessarily have the current skills to move into the next phase of the company. So some of them didn’t make the cut. And that was the time when I had to start building my new team. And so I was able to hire a few people then. And then each… year, each couple of years, it’s grown. But again, it’s been very incremental. And this company is kind of well-known for people really like to work there. And so we don’t lose people, at least for my team. Maybe in some departments, they have a little bit more turnover. Maybe in the manufacturing side where people are working hard 12-hour shifts, it’s a little different. But in the IT side, people stay around. I’ve got one guy that’s been with the company 22 years. And then the people that I’ve hired, for the most part of all, stayed with me. I’ve got one that’s going on nine years, another about 10 years. So, you know, there’s not as much hiring that happens that way. But in the last year or two, we have started to have a chance to grow a little bit more. And it gives us an opportunity for people that hadn’t been management to move up into a management position as we bring in new roles and new positions that can report to them.

Speaker 0 | 12:01.586

So I’m going to zero in on what you said about your employee longevity. And one of the things about being a great leader is how I always like to nuance this because people move in their careers. And sometimes just because somebody isn’t there for a long time doesn’t mean that you failed as a leader. Maybe they grew in that. That was the next logical position for them. But also with longevity, there’s a sauce to that, if you will, that each of us. tries to put together to gain the desire for somebody to work for us for a long time. What do you think you’ve done that has led to that with your staff?

Speaker 1 | 12:40.188

Right. Well, you know, like I hear you saying, it’s a two-sided coin. On the one hand, you want people to have the best opportunities for them. So that’s the way that I look at my team is if as long as they are being fulfilled by being part of my team and working with me, if… I want them to stay and keep growing and stay as long as possible. If, on the other hand, their best opportunity is elsewhere, then I want to help them get there too. And so, sure, I’m going to possibly lose out from that at some point if I help somebody find their next position and it’s not with me. But there’s a lot more – how would you put it? There’s a lot more comfort. in knowing that you’re not under the gun, under a microscope, and that you don’t have to worry about, hey, if I’m thinking about other things, my boss, I hope he doesn’t find out. I’d rather have that open conversation and say, hey, if you are looking for something else, is it because you’re lacking something here? Am I not doing something right? Do we need to work on what it is that you do or how you do it so that you are happier here? Or is it really that there are just great opportunities elsewhere in, for instance, a bigger company? So I had one person that was like, this has happened at least once where I had somebody on my team and they were really good, but they were in business analysis and project management and they were the only one and they didn’t really have much experience with it. And so she wanted someone to mentor her and train her into being a really good BAPM. And we didn’t really have anybody to do that. It wasn’t something that any of us had skill sets in. And so eventually she went to a large banking organization that had a huge team and she came in at a low level. And in the past few years has now been moving up the ranks. And apparently from what I hear, she’s gotten very good at that because she had people that she could learn from. So obviously for her, it was better to go somewhere where she could learn, be mentored and grow her career rather than just staying with me because. you know, that’s where she already was. So, you know, instead we had to, we had to get by without her and that was difficult for a while, but at the same time, you know, we now have somebody else in that position that’s going to bring something different to the table.

Speaker 0 | 14:56.990

Yeah. I think your philosophy and mine are very much in alignment. Like, so what I’m hearing you say is if I was to synthesize that into, into almost maybe a soundbite style type of thing, would you support? your employees in whatever their future may hold that’s where you gain their loyalty and the loyalty does not is not expressed solely by them staying with you it’s it’s through you know the support that you give even if that next opportunity is somewhere else they’ll pay that loyalty back at some point in the future for you you know and you know because like there are people you know that that situation you described that that woman who The opportunity wasn’t there, but you were honest with her about like, hey, you know, if there’s that new opportunity in the future here, at some point that’s elsewhere, I’m going to be support. Put me down as your first reference. You know, like, like, I don’t want you to be scared to think that if it’s time for you to look for the next opportunity that that’s going to be, I’m going to treat that as a negative for us. You know, like, like our role as the leader is to adapt and manage through the change. And sometimes that change involves. somebody leaving. And then it’s just my responsibility, if you will, to help our organization through that.

Speaker 1 | 16:18.341

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Well said. And I learned this from other leaders. So the position that I had right before becoming a CIO was that I was working for a company that was in the midst of being acquired by a much larger company. And it was a really kind of tumultuous time. It was difficult. Nobody knew whether they were still going to have a job after or where the synergies were going to be. And the director that I reported to, he came to me and he said, hey, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to give you a job in the new company. So if you have other opportunities that you could take, don’t hesitate to go pursue those and look for them. It’s probably a good idea. So he was looking out for me. He wasn’t just looking out for, hey, I want to hold on to this guy all the way through the merger because… You know, he’s really going to, you know, help me get what I need. He was thinking about my needs. And as a result, that’s why I got this CIO position that if I hadn’t felt the comfort to go ahead and interview it, I would have missed out on. So, you know, that’s one of those things about being a leader that, you know, pay attention to the leaders that are doing a good job and think about, hey, how did that affect me? And how did I feel from being treated that way? And make sure that I pass that along to those that report to me.

Speaker 0 | 17:31.940

Now. This role is your, this is your first role as, I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m going off your LinkedIn profile here. You’re, this is your first role as a CIO. I mean, you’ve been in it for a long time. Prior to this, you were in leadership roles, but not necessarily as the leader. Maybe you were, because you described you were in large organizations. Is that, is that an accurate statement?

Speaker 1 | 17:51.056

Yes, for the most part. Other than a couple of times where I was in very small organizations where I was the leader. So maybe, maybe take this opportunity to kind of just. back up a little and give my trajectory history of where I started and how I got to CIO. You want to do that?

Speaker 0 | 18:08.771

Absolutely. Let’s hear it. Okay. Tell us how you got to today.

Speaker 1 | 18:12.333

Yeah, sure. So, the majority of my career has been in software development. So, I got my degree in computer science. And the first thing that I did was while I was in college, I started getting programming jobs and doing… writing software systems for companies on a contract basis while I was getting my degree. And then once I graduated, I just moved right into the market and did programming jobs. And in each of the places that I worked, I seemed to rise to the level of at least being a leader or a team leader of some kind. So wherever I went, even if there were people that had much more experience and were older than me, it seemed like they still kind of made me the team lead and put me in charge of organizing and making sure that things got done. So, you know, I’m not looking back. I’m not sure exactly what it was other than just I must have exhibited those kind of skill sets that, you know, in IT, you’ve got very technical people who are really good at just doing the technical side of things, but they’re not really they don’t have the soft skills. They don’t necessarily step up and know how to lead or to work with people outside the IT organization. So that seemed to come naturally to me. you know, from job to job. I did that for a few years until one of the companies that I was working for in Tulsa, we were working on video conferencing software. And this was in the early 90s. So, you know, thinking back, that was when people were still using modems, dialogue modems, and the bandwidth was not really there for sophisticated video conferencing. But we were trying to make it work anyway. That was the goal, over a modem, to be able to have a video conference, just like what we’re doing right now. Because at the time, the only kind of video conferencing was these and these were just the ones that were being used. H320 room-based systems and big banks and corporations had it for their boardrooms, but people couldn’t do it just on their PC. So we were working on that. And about that time, a company in California that primarily did Macintosh software, but they also had created this little eyeball-shaped camera called the QuickCam. And it started out on Macs, and then they expanded onto PCs. Did you remember those?

Speaker 0 | 20:25.684

I remember this. So this is Connectix, right?

Speaker 1 | 20:28.046

Yes.

Speaker 0 | 20:28.867

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 20:29.167

Yeah. So that was Connectix, and their claim to fame was creating a software called RAM Doubler, which apparently anybody who had a Mac at that time had RAM Doubler because it was virtual memory for the Mac, which didn’t exist out of the box. And then they created one called Speed Doubler, and then later they were working on one which was called – I can’t remember what the name of it was, but it ended up getting sold to Microsoft as Virtual PC. which is what then became remote desktop and all of those, the Hyper-V, that type of thing. So I moved out to the San Francisco Bay Area. I lived in a little town called Half Moon Bay just south of San Francisco right on the coast. I’ve been there.

Speaker 0 | 21:14.980

Yeah, so

Speaker 1 | 21:16.201

I got one of the best surfing locations on the West Coast.

Speaker 0 | 21:20.884

This is a real terrible, terrible time in your life, I’m sure, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 21:26.208

And, you know, my wife and I, you know, I was already married, but we didn’t have any kids. So it was a good time to move and be out there. But, you know, worked there for a couple of years until my wife got pregnant. And we started thinking about things like, wow, we really don’t have the money to own a house out here. We still owned a house back in Oklahoma, had family and friends and everything. And so we decided to move back to Oklahoma, you know, to have kids. But at the time. I said, hey, I’m going back to Oklahoma. I’d rather keep working for you than have to get another job. So I said, okay, we can do that. So I started working remotely, and that was 1996. And then a year later, Connectic sold the QuickCam to Logitech. So then it became the Logitech QuickCam. And it’s still staying for quite a few years, the little ball-shaped camera. But then eventually it took on other shapes. And, you know, they’ve… the Logitech’s had a thriving camera business. Logitech’s what I’ve got sitting on top of my computer right now, but it was still the same thing. I was still working on the team, trying to make video conferencing that could be done over low bandwidth and all of the things that, that, that went along with that. And I worked from them for them for another six years. So I’m working remotely, doing a full remote job, um, quite a few years before it was common. And, uh, um, until finally it got to the point where, again, I was. getting moved up into management positions. And it just got where they said, look, if you want to keep moving up into management and doing a lot, we want you to move back to California. And by this time, we had gotten well-established in Oklahoma, and I didn’t want to go back. So I left that and joined a friend of mine who had an IT managed services company, Microsoft Gold Service Provider, and I came in as a partner and part owner of that. So during that time, I was… the top, the head, but there were only two or three people working for me. After that, moved on to several other jobs, and each of them was the top IT person in that company, but sometimes it was the only IT person in that company or two people in that company or something like that. At one point, I had about 10 people working for me as I was a manager of an IT group. But at each of these times, I would… some of these companies had to lay me off. And so about three times in a row over a course of about three years, I got laid off. And each time I would go from a really good, strong leadership position back to sitting in a cubicle, banging out code. And I think there were some big lessons to be learned from that because, you know, once you get into leadership, you kind of don’t want to move backwards. You think, hey, if I’m a director, I don’t want to go back down to manager. If I’m a manager, I don’t want to go back down to just, you know, worker bee. But ultimately, you’ve got to work. And so I would take these jobs and say, hey, I’m just going to do the best that I can. And I like to write code anyway. So I would take these programming jobs. And within a few months, they’d say, hey, you’re really being underutilized, aren’t you? You’ve been a director of IT before, and you’re just writing code. I say, yeah, that’s pretty true. And so pretty soon, I’m getting promoted up the ladder again. So I think that’s why when the CIO position came. And the owner of the company at that time wasn’t looking for a seasoned CIO. He was looking for somebody who could be a new CIO and come in and learn the ropes. But at the same time, bring fresh, new knowledge of new technology. Because his current CIO was near retirement, and he’d been there 20, 25 years. And so he knew that maybe somebody who had knowledge of the new technologies could come in and help, you know, bring that revitalization to the company from a technology perspective.

Speaker 0 | 25:13.085

That’s your current role here.

Speaker 1 | 25:14.126

And that’s the current role at Paragon Films is that’s how I came in. And the cool thing about the owner at the time was he said, I’ll let the current CIO stay on for a year to pass the baton. And so, you know, you can learn the ropes, do whatever you need to during that year in order to move up to be ready to fully take on that CIO role without having to just come in and say, all right, let me pick up the pieces from the guy that’s not around anymore.

Speaker 0 | 25:39.713

Yeah. And so many of us don’t get much transition. You know, the person’s the person’s out for they moved on to a new opportunity or some other thing. Or there’s very limited handoff, you know, a couple of weeks or something like that where it’s, you know, here’s all the stuff, by the way, let’s run around. You know, do you see this? That’s great. We got this to go to, you know, let’s let’s move on. So going back to in your career history, and I think it was really interesting what you shared about you spent a period where you went up and then down and up and down and up and down. What kind of leadership lessons did you learn during that period? Maybe I’ll frame it this way. What things did you learn during that period that you really think helped you be successful now?

Speaker 1 | 26:23.042

Yeah, there’s a lot. Let me just pick a couple of good ones. One is humility. You know, it’s easy to get a little bit of a big head and a little bit of an ego when you’re at the top, when you’re in a leadership role, you start thinking that you’re all that. And when you get relegated back down to the lowest position, you have to just sort of accept, hey, you know what? Nobody’s better than any other people. You know, depending on the situation, you could be the leader, you could be the follower. And so kind of learn to deal with that and still do the best you can. The other thing that I really learned from that is that leadership doesn’t come with the position. You know, leadership is about a mindset. It’s about what you do with what you have and what you have to work with. So if I came in and I was in a role that did not have any leadership job description, I just led by doing whatever it was that I did. I would just step up and, I guess, lead by example or jump in and take control without taking control in a forceful way. So fill a gap that needed to be filled. Nobody’s organizing this. Okay, I’ll step and organize it. Nobody’s taking care of the internal customers as these, you know, help requests come in. Okay, I’ll jump on that. I’ll be help desk guy. You know, whatever it is that helps make sure that things get done. And then, you know, the other thing that you learn from that is that nobody’s going to just notice that you’re doing a good job and move you up the ladder. You have to take ownership. So that was something that I learned is that if I just sat there and kept my head down and worked hard, people would be very grateful for that and glad that I did it. And that’s about it. If I actually wanted to go beyond that and move into something else, I had to learn how to toot my own horn. You know, and that is a real fine line between bragging and sounding like you’re trying to make yourself look good.

Speaker 0 | 28:36.298

There’s an art to this, doing this well.

Speaker 1 | 28:38.879

Yeah, exactly. And that’s something that I had to learn was demonstrating value and return on investment and be able to show, you know, an excitement and a passion. By communicating to leaders in other departments or to executive leadership, oh, this is so exciting. You wouldn’t believe the neat things that we’re doing or the ways that we’re going to be able to help the company or the things you’re going to be able to do with this stuff we’re working on. You know, that kind of excitement and passion is something that makes people say, oh, hey, what’s going on over there? You know, and that’s when they take notice and think, hey, maybe we need to, you know, give you more responsibility or help you move into something else.

Speaker 0 | 29:17.053

Nice. That’s awesome. And it’s, you know, so many of us, I mean, I think at some point, most of us in leadership have faced some sort of like significant hardship through that process, whether it’s a setback where we, you know, a loss of a role or something like that. But to have to go through it a handful of times and continually to kind of stand back up and get back ahead, there’s, I’m so glad you’re able to share that with our listeners, because I think that that provides some real additional perspective about how. the perseverance in that process is really important. And if you can keep going at it, you will find that success over time. You just got to put in some of that work to get there.

Speaker 1 | 29:57.779

Yeah. This is off topic, but I just want to interject this because- We’re all about off topic here.

Speaker 0 | 30:03.925

We could definitely go down a rabbit hole.

Speaker 1 | 30:04.926

I was thinking about this. Whenever I first came into this new role as a CIO, you mentioned it was my first CIO job. And so I had a little bit of nervousness about- hey, I want to do a good job. I want to look good. I don’t want to look stupid. And so it came time for our first staff meeting. I did report directly to the CEO at that time, along with the heads of sales and HR and the general counsel and the CFO. We all, you know, once a week, there was a meeting where you sit around the table with the CEO and you make all the big decisions. And so it came time for my first one of those. And so I got all ready and I hustled into the boardroom and the head of operations turns and he starts sniffing and he goes, what is that smell? There’s an awful smell in here. You guys check your shoes. And so I was like, well, sure, it’s not me. But I looked and sure enough, there was dog poop on the bottom of my shoe. I was thinking, where in the world did I get that? So I start following it. And I look, and there it is, trailed across the carpet of the boardroom, followed it down the hall, all the way back to my office, and then realized that what had happened was the boss had this little dog that he brought to work with him. And this little dog decided that the way he was going to welcome me to Paragon Films was he was going to take a dump right on the floor in front of my desk. And the way that I stepped. on it, I remembered after this that when I got to the boardroom, I remembered that I’d forgotten my notebook. So I ran back down the hall and without turning the light onto my office, I just kind of jumped in real quick, grabbed the notebook off my desk and went back to the office. Well, apparently it was during that time that this dog had come in and given me that precious little gift.

Speaker 0 | 31:56.716

Oh my God, that’s awesome. So here you are, your introduction to the first big meeting of the company, new CIO. all the other C-level executives, and you’re bringing the dog poop.

Speaker 1 | 32:08.983

Yep. So you want to talk about something that takes you down a few notches and makes you feel not really that important. It’s, you know, bringing dog poo on your on your shoe right into the your first meeting with the boss.

Speaker 0 | 32:21.774

That is, that’s, that’s awesome. I’m really glad you, you feel okay sharing that with us. Because, you know, like, it’s, it’s, it’s a humorous story. This is one of the benefits of, of, I think, of time. is that you look back on it and it’s humorous. But if we asked you like two weeks later, you probably were mortified for like months.

Speaker 1 | 32:42.058

Well, you know, my wife said I couldn’t do that. I could not work someplace where, you know, the boss can have his dog there and it’s just going to go right on the floor. I wouldn’t do it, you know, but I thought the thing is it’s a CIO job. You know, I’m not sitting in a cubicle banging out code. I have that opportunity to really make a difference in a company. Now, fast forward a couple of years, and my first big job was to bring a new ERP system into the company. Like I said, they’d been on this system that had been built in a language called RPG back in the early 90s. They were still on version 1.0 20 years later because once you customize it, you can’t upgrade it.

Speaker 0 | 33:21.397

I had RPG programmers when I was the CIO of a county several years ago. So I’ve been through this process of moving off a legacy AS400.

Speaker 1 | 33:30.632

Absolutely. And, you know, that there were, you know, one of the guys on my team, his job at that time was every day to go print out a big stack of green bar paper and take it to each of the executives and put it on their desk because they would flip through the reports. And this is 2013. This is not 1995 that we’re talking about. But anyway, so so I had this job to get this new ERP system implemented. It took us about 15 months. Spent a couple of million dollars on it. And at the end of it, the boss was so pleased that we had done this. You know, I just, I was on top of the world. I, you know, we had a big party to celebrate. There were big bonuses for everyone. You know, everything was riding high for a couple of weeks until we got to this point where something bad happened. The reports that the boss counted on every day, he wasn’t getting those yet. Because it takes a long time sometimes when you get a new system to get everything to the point where you can have the reports exactly the way you want them in the old system. And so we were struggling with that. We were working with some consultants. We were trying to make it happen. Well, I had scheduled a vacation. about a year earlier. We had already had to delay it a couple of times, but we finally got to where this was the time, the only time it could happen. It was after the project was all complete, everything should be fine. So I took this family vacation to go on a cruise and go to Disney World and all this stuff. And when I got back, the CEO calls me into his office and he says, you have done the unforgivable. You went on vacation when I didn’t have my reports. So as a consequence, you will not get a bonus this year. You will not get the big raise that I had planned for you. And he delineated all the other benefits and niceties of my job that would be removed from me because of my failure. So you go from this high of having just finished a 15-month absolutely grueling deployment that I’ve worked night and day for. And when I finally get that chance to take a break and go on vacation, I come back and I’m just excoriated. Man, that was tough. You know, stepping on the dog poop was a little bit humiliating. But basically getting to the point where you’re going back to your office and going, do I stay or do I go? Is this job good enough and important enough that I can swallow my pride? and just say, I’m sorry, sir, I’ll do better and try to get over it and overcome? Or do I just say to heck with it and go find something else?

Speaker 0 | 36:23.392

So how did this turn out in the end? I mean, you’re at this inflection point now. So what comes next?

Speaker 1 | 36:29.477

So the first thing that I did was I went back to my office. I think I probably called my wife and I thought about it. I said, well, here’s the thing. If I. quit right now. It might feel good to just fling it back in his face, but he probably expects it anyway. He probably figures, hey, if this guy can’t handle it, he’s just going to quit. And so that wouldn’t really be all that satisfying. And I wouldn’t have a job. And that wouldn’t really be cool. So I thought, hey, the least I could do is stick it out while I see if I could find another job or something like that. So I just swallowed my pride, went back in there. apologize, hat in hand. And the thing is, within a few weeks, maybe a few months, he’d gotten over it, probably forgot about it. And all was good. All was forgiven. We got all the reports working and everything was great from that point, from a company perspective and from his perspective. But the blow to my bride and to my feelings of self-worth took a big hit. I mean, that’s just that’s a hard thing to get over. I tend to be kind of a wear your feelings on your sleeve kind of person anyway, which is difficult in leadership to you do have to learn to have somewhat of a tough, you know, thick skin. But often that thick skin is really just it’s a veneer you have to put on the appearance of a thick skin internally. If you’re hurt, you can’t you know, you’re hurt. You can’t really do anything about it. So for quite a while, I did lack a certain amount of self-confidence. that I think kept me from moving as fast or as well as I could have during that time, because I was constantly worried about, am I going to screw up again? You know, what’s going to happen if I don’t do right? Because after, you know, maybe some people like, you know, I’ve heard, I know some guys in high school, they got that coach that’s really mean and yells at them all the time. And they say, that’s what made me what I am. That’s why I’m so good. You know, That coach would not work for me. When I had that track coach, it was the worst thing ever. I don’t respond well to somebody who comes down with a ton of bricks and says, hey, but if you come through it, you’re going to be better. So obviously there was a big lesson learned for me on the kind of leader that I wanted to be, which doesn’t do that. But also the cool thing was that I’d been there two years at that point. Two years later, he sold the company, and I haven’t had to work. you know, from ever since. And now, you know, looking back at it, that was a really negative experience and a period of time there that was difficult and hard. But the next seven years have been wonderful. They’ve been the best years of my career. So looking back on it, am I glad that I stuck it out and stayed? Absolutely. That was the right thing to do. It was hard. It took a lot of patience and, you know, it was difficult emotionally for a while. Um, but you know, in the long run, it’s definitely been the right choice. I’ve had so many more opportunities being a CIO than quitting and maybe going back to, all right, let’s go do this again. Let’s go, you know, sit in the cubicle and hope that this turns into something else.

Speaker 0 | 39:47.158

Yeah, no, that’s. This is a great story to share and to plumb this out a little bit here. I’m going to offer my kind of, I’m trying to think of how to phrase this. I’m going to offer my observations of the story that you described and the behavior of that gentleman. And, you know, because here on the podcast, this is a leadership podcast about being leaders and being effective leaders. And the, I think that one of the most detrimental things you can do. is to unnecessarily come, come in on your staff. People make mistakes and the mistake you, you need to offer a path to fix it, you know? So if, if I have a staff person who does something terribly wrong, you know, I mean, as long as we’re not like, you know, they’re not stealing something, they’re not losing, you know, a million dollars or something like that, you know, something that, you know, truly we can’t really come back from, you got to go. Um, If it’s just a, I would call it a garden variety mistake. And I would describe what you described as a garden variety mistake. You know, you were, you were gone and you didn’t realize that the importance to this individual of these particular things, he happened to own the company. So we haven’t hold the cards, but at the end of the day, he offered, you know, path to redemption. You know, you had to forge it essentially by deciding to stick it out in spite of what he said and did. And that set you back kind of mentally. And that’s that type of, you know, we talk about what good leadership is. And if, you know, I guess I would go back and say, if he had changed his behaviors, what benefits would that have had for him during those next two years when you were there that you spent being essentially kind of, you know, pulled into your shell a little bit being like, I don’t want to mess up again, man. Like, I don’t want that to happen a second time. And what did he miss out on?

Speaker 1 | 41:42.199

Yeah. Yeah, it’s a really good point. And, you know, that’s one of the things that I look back on all this from is when a negative experience happens, the best thing you can do with that is say, what can I learn from this? You know, how can I be a better leader as a result of the experience that I had? And so I have to say whether I consciously thought about it and put together a plan or a strategy as a result, or whether I just reacted in a way that said, you know, hey, that really felt good. bad, I wouldn’t want to inflict that on someone else. So later on down the road, when somebody fails miserably in their job, what’s the right approach to take? Even if I’m mad, even if I feel like they really deserve a lashing about it, is there a better thing that I can do to make sure that not only they learn from it, feel grateful for having not been completely chastised over it? And instead, you know, develop some long-term loyalty as a result of handling it well. And that person now being, you know, their best self as a result of that interaction instead of their somewhat less.

Speaker 0 | 42:59.270

Absolutely. Yeah. Like, if I’m encouraging my staff, they’re not going to be encouraged to give their best work if they’re being berated. You know, so like if they’ve done something wrong, like there’s not much use in. browbeating them about the terrible job that they did. It’s to find the path to get them to correct it. And sometimes that’s either difficult or the individual doesn’t see it and they don’t have that capability. And then that becomes my role as the leader to see when that happens. So I guess I’m getting some feelings here. You shared the story because… It makes me, it almost makes me cringe to be like, wow, you know, and I know there’s people like this out there that act like that. But, you know, to get a chance to sit and talk in an open forum like this, where we just, we’re kind of bantering back and forth about kind of how terrible it was. And almost, well, we were dissecting popular IT nerds. Here we are dissecting this, you know, really terrible example of leadership and how it influenced and impacted you.

Speaker 2 | 44:03.544

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Speaker 0 | 46:23.122

With that, I’m going to steer us a little bit towards more humorous. or lighthearted conversation for a couple minutes here. We get towards the end of our interview, but you mentioned that you had all this old technology and green bar stuff and things like that. What was the most humorously outdated thing that you had when you started at this role or that you’ve seen?

Speaker 1 | 46:46.549

Hate to say it, but Lotus Notes.

Speaker 0 | 46:49.490

Lotus Notes! Lotus Notes! I took care of a domino server for a while when I was in my early career.

Speaker 1 | 46:54.928

Yeah, so that’s what was still in place when I came on board in 2013 was Lotus Notes. And I looked at that and I said, hey, we used that at Logitech back in 1997. And it was really pretty cool then, but that was a pretty outdated thing. Another thing was probably just having an executive tell me, listen, I’m not a computer guy. I wouldn’t know how to turn one on. I like. wow, this is an interesting day and age to have an executive who takes a bit of pride in not knowing how to turn on a computer. How does that happen now? But nothing as humorous as looking back on my early days. So that’s the thing. I’ve been in this thing a long time. My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 3. I was the first kid in my whole junior high to have a computer at all. So, you know, it’s it’s come so far that any technology to me is light years ahead of what I’ve seen in the past.

Speaker 0 | 48:00.750

So now with that TRS-80, were you like you like watch like the War Games movie and stuff in the early 80s and be like, how do I do this? Right. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 48:07.976

absolutely. I had we had these modems that we had this thing called a war dialer dial out different things and see if it would get a, you know.

Speaker 0 | 48:19.408

Were you a BBS person back in the day?

Speaker 1 | 48:21.148

Yes, yeah. Graphic fate of a whole bunch of text all strung together that if you squint your eyes right, it looks like a real picture of something.

Speaker 0 | 48:29.151

Yeah, this is the early days of internet. Very slightly pre-internet, I guess, is officially what this is. Because officially the internet wasn’t around until the early 90s.

Speaker 1 | 48:43.454

I missed punch cards. I do have some…

Speaker 0 | 48:47.556

you know cios that are a few years older that had to had to walk around with a stack of punch cards i did miss that era yeah when i was uh when i started college so i you know i think i’m a couple years younger than you but but not many and when i started college uh i was my first classes were in cobalt still because it was you know i was coming over coming up on year 2000 so they’re all like oh man you know you’re gonna make tons of money fixing you know fixing your 2000 glitches and stuff like that Well,

Speaker 1 | 49:13.860

funny thing now, if you can do COBOL now, you can make buck because there are 45 of the largest 50 banks still run on COBOL today. At least on their systems. It’s solid. It still works. The problem is, is that nobody’s taught that anymore. And so the group of people who can work on those systems is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. So they have to have these projects to migrate it over to Java. But in the meantime, if you’re one of those guys still banging out… you know, COBOL or JCL, they’re still work for you.

Speaker 0 | 49:47.384

So I always like to ask, you shared what your first computer was, but tell us something about you that, let’s see, something that somebody wouldn’t expect about you. And I’ll give an example for myself. I once DJed a wedding.

Speaker 1 | 50:04.082

This isn’t a humorous thing, but you might not know it anyway. My first formative years were in the Middle East. Oh, really? Yeah, so my parents were hospital workers, and they worked in the hospital in Gaza, which is where all the mess is going on right now. That’s where we live. We live right in the heart of Gaza City. My parents worked in the hospital. And that was in the early 70s. At that time, it was Israeli occupied territory. So it wasn’t particularly a dangerous place. I mean, compared to now, I mean, you did still have the occasional bomb going off in the marketplace and that kind of thing. But, you know, my memories of it were good. We lived near the beach and we, you know, I had a very nice childhood. But when my parents left that job and moved back to the United States, I felt a little bit like a foreign kid. So. I was starting the second grade and I didn’t know anything about football and kiss and, you know, whatever, whatever the cool kids were doing at that time. And it was probably a number of years before I felt like like an American, because growing up overseas, it was, you know, more more like a foreigner. But what it really did, though, was it informed my worldview to where ever since then, I do have a much more big view of my place in the world not being limited. to Oklahoma, USA, but kind of the whole globe.

Speaker 0 | 51:30.700

That’s awesome. So, Kenny, just to wrap up, what things would you like to share? If we were to say a couple of lessons of leadership that you would share with somebody, what would they be?

Speaker 1 | 51:42.848

I think the number one lesson that I would tell anybody aspiring to leadership is that the people are the most important thing, not the project. not the technology, but the people. If you can learn to work together with people and have shared aspirations, shared goals, both within the company where you’re sharing the goals of accomplishing some project or goals together, but also just living life together, caring about them as individuals, knowing about their family, about their hobbies, about their difficulties. If they’ve got… You know… kids with, you know, suffering some kind of sickness or whatever it might be that you care about that and get to know them. The technology projects are going to be so much more interesting and fun and go so much better because you’re working with your friends, you’re working with your family and you’re much, it’s much easier to overlook, you know, oh, somebody may not have, you know, lived up to their, my expectations for them today. But you know what? I like this guy. He’s my friend. He’s my family. We’ll figure it out. We’ll work together and come up with a plan to do better with that. But you don’t have this idea of just, you know what? It’s all about getting the job done. I may better fire this guy.

Speaker 0 | 53:04.173

Awesome. Kenny, thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.

Speaker 1 | 53:09.057

Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me. It’s been very interesting, and I hope that your listeners will be able to take something away from it.

Speaker 0 | 53:16.980

All right, that’s a wrap on today’s episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m Doug Kameen, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode.