Speaker 0 | 00:02.592

I have Teams Premium, so it wants to transcribe everything. All right. So, oh, and do you go by, I mean, everything you have says Jacob. So you’re Jacob.

Speaker 1 | 00:15.262

I actually go by Jake. I’m a two-name person. I can go by Jake, but I go by Jacob probably more, I would say more professionally. Jake is more like, my cousins, like, we’re at a bonfire. He’s like, Jake, throw me a beer. You know, it’s like, okay, that’s usually where Jake is the name, but it’s just both. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 00:32.096

Yep. Okay. That’s fine. So I’ll make sure to, I’ll call you Jacob for the, on the podcast then just, uh, cause that’s, you know, professional podcast, professional, uh, you know, professional naming convention. Um, and your vice president of information technologies as, is it just sellers? Is that.

Speaker 1 | 00:47.062

It is actually technically sellers absorbent materials, but sellers is what you’ll see on like, you know, if you go to home Depot or, you know, you see the products in a, you know, target or things like that, you’ll see sellers on it versus like.

Speaker 0 | 01:00.988

the actual full name okay all right so yeah i’ll probably just introduce it to sellers but we’ll get into a whole conversation about like what it actually is sure as well so all right clear my throat there make sure i’m all good so what i’m going to do is i’ll create a pause point that’ll enable them to to cut and start the audio and then we’ll jump right into it interesting

Speaker 1 | 01:25.518

learning all the behind the scenes secrets yeah that’s right all right

Speaker 0 | 01:32.176

Welcome back to today’s episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m your host, Doug Kameen, and today I’m talking with Jacob Jones, Vice President of Information Technology at Sellers. Welcome to the show, Jacob.

Speaker 1 | 01:44.084

Thanks for having me, Doug. So,

Speaker 0 | 01:48.287

Jacob, you’re coming to us, you’re Vice President of IT, but you’ve got a long history of working in IT, in leadership for a lot of years, at some really brand-name companies. You’re currently working for a manufacturing outfit with products that pretty much all of us have probably touched. And in your past roles, we’ve almost definitely been to some of the places you’ve been doing IT for. Can you elaborate a little bit on where’s your history coming to us from?

Speaker 1 | 02:20.153

Yeah. So I’ve actually, you know, one of the things I’ve had fun with in leadership roles is working in different industries. Part of that is, you know, you’re always kind of like, hey, maybe the grass is greener on the other side. Then, of course, it isn’t usually. You’re like, oh, my gosh, everyone has tech debt and a lot of the same problems. Right. So I’ve been in in the medical area working for, you know, health care. I’ve been in manufacturing. Currently, I’m in manufacturing retail. You know, so some of the some of the companies I work for, like, you know, Fortune 500 companies like Foot Locker, you know, Manpower Group. I worked for at one point, you know, a large boiler manufacturer. pretty well known. So yeah, I’ve been kind of in and out some different industries. And, you know, it’s been a fun ride to experience everything that you learn in each of those places.

Speaker 0 | 03:08.193

So thinking about jumping back and forth, you know, I mean, Foot Locker is a household name, pretty much. I’m sure most of our listeners are like, oh, Foot Locker. I’ve been there. I bought my shoes there. I love going there. I hate going there. Whatever the case may be, they know it. Your current outfit. uh that you’re working for sellers uh is is in the the manufacturing business of but it’s in like uh i don’t know i’ve drawn a blank for a second on the product category you’re making towels and other absorbent materials and those types of things so you’re in places like home depot and things like that yeah

Speaker 1 | 03:38.068

that’s correct actually and uh the interesting story is you know um it’s the it’s i’m sure other other leaders have kind of this trajectory in their career you know you maybe start at maybe a mid-sized company or small company and kind of maybe move into bigger companies Who knows, maybe start right at the biggest company in the world and just, you know, company size and culture are so related. And so, yeah, when I when I made the move into sellers, I was really looking for, you know, something that would make an impact. And, you know, so I kind of had the option of, you know, some larger, you know, again, staying in the, you know, well over a decade in Fortune 500 companies and leadership. But what attracted me to this was honestly just the impact of the products. Um, going back into manufacturing, I hadn’t been in manufacturing for, I want to say 15 years. Right. Um, and there’s something about when you make something and it’s impactful, um, that it, I don’t know, there’s just meaning it’s so visceral, right. And sellers, I’ll just say this. Um, you’ve used the products, you know, uh, white rags in a box, blue shop towels, these things are staples. Like people use them. They don’t think about it, but also sellers. And this is one of the things that attracted me is creating things like paper towels, a hundred percent recycled. All the art. I should say 90% are greater recycled, but all the products are recycled products. And this was the kicker. They perform as well or better. And that sounds crazy to say or better. than the competing products that are virgin materials. So for me, like, you know, I’ve always, you know, you think you, you, you go to school or college and you, you take like corporate social responsibility classes and things. And you’re like, yeah, that’d be neat to work for a company that actually makes a difference. But, you know, I gotta make some, I gotta make some money and, you know, frankly, business is business. But, um, I always secretly wanted to work for somebody that did something like, and not to say the companies I worked for didn’t do some good things, but this is really doing a good thing. Um, using all your Amazon boxes and things that you think are getting recycled. They aren’t really, but a company like us will take that stuff and we’ll make a new product. So I don’t want to go too deep into it, but I’ll just say that even though I had other options on the table, I literally had the CEO do a demonstration of the paper towels for me. These are paper towels that are just now a new product that are in Targets. Not fully, just I think maybe like 300 stores at this point. some grocery stores, but it’s a new market for the business, but it is the best paper towel I’ve ever used. And I’ve never seen a product that is green because I like to use green products, right. That outperforms everything else. So I’m like, I’m on board. I was like, I want to support this. I want to help this business grow. And of course it’s fun too, to be in a, you know, in a midsize company, you know, if you do a digital transformation, you feel it like, whoa, holy cow, the revenue increases, you know, massive things happen when you’re in a fortune 500 company. Some of the things you do there, they’re strategic and they move the needle, but not in quite the same way.

Speaker 0 | 06:33.206

I’m glad you brought that up because I was actually going to dive down that hole a little bit here. Working for a fun locker, Fortune 500 company, very large enterprise. You’re at a midsize organization now. You just alluded to some of the differences between how the impact changes from one to the next. What… What are some of the other major differences that you’ve seen in the IT space between how each one either has to operate or chooses to operate?

Speaker 1 | 07:07.395

So this is going to be an interesting thing to say, but I had kind of forgotten. This is maybe crazy to say, but I kind of forgotten how fun it was to execute and deliver. And that’s not to say you don’t execute and deliver in a Fortune 500 company. But. The layers you operate through, the silos you move through. I mean, it’s great. It’s, you know, great fun leadership stuff. But, you know, what do you actually output? And often it’s multi-year projects and things don’t quite get done.

Speaker 0 | 07:36.075

The chain is long, basically.

Speaker 1 | 07:37.797

Yeah, very long. Transitioning into this environment is very fast. And I’ll say another thing is, you know, culturally, I feel like, and again, I’m not disparaging any listeners that have, you know, that do work for large companies. But. There’s a disproportionate amount of time, at least I’ll say for myself, that I spent just on, you know, the politics side. You know, obviously you have relationships with people, but you’re often navigating silos and trying to get people to come together. And how can we diplomatically pull this off and, you know, do a matrix style kind of collaboration, right? And I spent, you know, 50% of my time doing that. Now I don’t have to spend my time doing that. What I spend my time on is delivering really, really fast projects, you know. New e-commerce platform in three months. Like that’s crazy. I mean, I would spend years on that. You know, things I would spend years on, I’ll just say, I’m able to without all of the obstacles and red tape and things like that. I’m not saying we’re doing it sloppy either, right? I have an enterprise architecture background. So using frameworks and approaches, always having breadcrumbs like a decision matrix and a process that tracks your decisions and how you choose one technology versus another. So I’m versed in a lot of the, I’ll call it the things that make a. very large company successful but you can implement those things super fast super lightweight and get results and i don’t know for me it’s just it reminded me of how rewarding was and that’s kind of how i got into technology right like what is cool about technology is you’re making almost magic happen i want to make this thing happen it’s like oh my god it’s it’s happening that actually works you know you don’t get that feeling um always you know i guess you do maybe you’re woodworking or something, you know, it’s like, Hey, I made something, but that’s how it is to me. It feels like that. Hey, I made something and I feel proud of it.

Speaker 0 | 09:23.920

Yeah. I, I, I hear exactly what you’re saying. Like the ability to, to go from idea to execution in a midsize organization is so much that, that, that line is so much shorter and the chains of people that you have to get approvals from. your ability to say we’re going to do this and this is the steps we’re going to take to do it and you turn around to your team and ask it’s like it’s it it’s it could be really gratifying to see those results really rapidly when you’re going through those projects absolutely and i will say one more thing about culture and again i’m not i don’t want to bad mouth anybody but and

Speaker 1 | 09:59.896

i’m not just saying you know because i’ve worked for some different fortune 500 companies but i feel like You know, everyone says in leadership that, hey, we’re transparent, we’re genuine, we want to be like this great, you know, easy, relaxed environment. But they aren’t really as easy and relaxed in larger corporations. I just have not really experienced it. Now, I’m sure that exists. I’m just saying I haven’t experienced it. But that’s another thing that I’ll say is a difference is there’s a lightness to, you know, you don’t have to be the only like I’ll just say one of my leadership traits, I would say, is. I like to be myself, right? I like to be genuine. I don’t always like to use leadership speak, right? You learn that in large companies. You know exactly the different things to say in the buzzwords, right? And I’m not saying there isn’t a place for that because you are leading people and there is, you know, you have to set an example and there are tough situations where maybe you use some of that. But I feel like, yeah, you can just be, you know, more relaxed, more genuine. And then that allows other people to be more relaxed, more genuine. They see, oh, this person can be goofy. I can just be goofy and just do something silly. And they’re like, what am I even looking at? This is our head of IT. What is that? And I like that because any leaders that I ever worked for that did stuff like that always surprised me. I’d be like, oh, that’s cool. Versus, oh, there’s this big chasm between me and this other person that maybe I work for. Or I work for their person that they work for. Or, sorry, there’s a chain of people going down. And you’re like, as you go up the chain. It’s sort of like there’s a more of a distance, you know, but I like there to be to not feel like there is. And I’ve always appreciated that about about different different folks. You know, I’ll give an example. The previous CEO for a Foot Locker, just for example, Dick. This is a guy that when people would meet him, they would actually they wouldn’t they’d have no idea he was a CEO because they’re like, oh, this guy was so nice. I’m like, yeah, that was that was the CEO of the company. You just didn’t think it because. You’d think, oh, he’s probably pomp and circumstance and he’s got to have a sort of a game face and things like that. No, he was just like, hey, I’m Dick and let me just talk to you. And you’re like, oh, this guy’s really cool and he’s funny and, you know, just kind of like fun to talk to. But yeah, you didn’t really have that. So I can’t say everything is like that. But just in general, I would say that’s one of the things that I appreciate and I’ve seen that’s kind of different and makes me go, hey, I like this kind of mid-sized space. And. you know, obviously mid-sized companies grow if you do the right things and they can become these large companies. And maybe you have to, if, if you, uh, if you don’t like something like what I’m talking about, maybe too much corporate culture kind of stuff, maybe I can influence that as a leader, right. To make sure that doesn’t happen so much as the company enters that kind of size.

Speaker 0 | 12:48.701

Yeah. Then I think about as a, you know, as an executive leader in a mid-sized organization, the things that I put high value on. So like I think about going back to just relating this to your story that you just shared, the ability to be relatable, to be accessible, to be perceived as a human and not like it. I mean, like maybe that’s not the right way to frame it, but to be perceived as having high empathy, you know, is those are really valuable to be successful as a leader in. any space. But the, I think one of the challenges is that the organization gets very, very large. There’s, uh, the, the executives end up becoming, there’s a high risk of becoming, uh, you know, siloed was one word you use, but, uh, uh, strategic, like you have to be, you have to be like, like strategically ambiguous at all times, you know, cause heaven forbid something happened and you’re on the wrong side of that conversation or whatever the case may be and stuff like that. And I know that there are executives who have navigated those waters and do it successfully. But it’s really difficult. It’s difficult to do and to do well and to make yourself appear humanly accessible and empathetic when you are this distant character in a story for other people. So I think about that as a positive experience, like being in a midsize organization and what that brings to the table. And like. like the way that I can show up. You know, I’m currently running like a very large project. And well, you mentioned enterprise architecture. I’ll go back to that. We created enterprise architecture where I work. You know, we’re probably about the same size corporation. We’re, you know, I work in the nonprofit space. We’re about 500 employees. And we put together an architecture for our systems and a plan for how to get there. So we’ve been steadily executing to bring ourselves in line with what we want to see. And. The biggest project is currently implementing a product, Oracle NetSuite. Well, that’s a huge product. Touches everything. You know, so we’ve got this monster. Just enormous transformation going on. And alongside with that, you know, if you’ve been through these types of organizational transformations or implementations, that’s only like the beginning. Because once you implement the NetSuite product or another ERP product, you’re like, oh, well, then this needs to change to fit with that. Or this one is better to interface with this so that it cascades into a whole set of other things. But when you’re going through the change management process of. of executing that project, the implementation, the communication, the things of building the relationships with the teams and everything else, the bigger the organization, I don’t want to say the harder it gets, but there’s like a sweet spot where it’s big enough to have teams that you can work with. Like I have, like, for instance, I have a project, I have a director of project management, you know, and if I was smaller, if our organization was smaller, we wouldn’t be big enough to support that type of position. But if we were, you know, say, you know, 3,000 or 5,000 employees, we would probably be so big that there would be a whole VP that was in charge of project management. And there’d be a team of, you know, 20 under them running it instead of a team of like a handful. So the closeness of the teams to the execution starts, you know, starts lengthening as the organization gets bigger. And it becomes harder to engage the change management process in a way that. people feel like they have an investment in the outcome and that they understand what’s going on and they they feel invested in goal that you’re setting out as opposed to it just being like a big corporate thing that’s happening to them as opposed to with them wow you just laid so many layers of just

Speaker 1 | 16:52.771

awesome concepts right right there like there is so much that we can say about the you know the architecture and how you put something like a new erp system and compared a mid-sized company compared to you know a large enterprise that’s maybe you know fortune 500 or you know fortune 100 and i was going to say that that you almost it took me back to like um maybe some trauma no it’s not not really trauma but maybe around just putting in new systems because you know first in architecture you envision the landscape you have an application portfolio you have all these systems And in any company that I’ve ever been in, I’m probably sure this is everywhere, things happened how they happened, right? Maybe it was organic. Maybe it was this. Maybe it was that. But nothing was perfectly planned. And in retrospect, what you do in enterprise architecture, right, you kind of make sense of the landscape. You go, well, look at this. Look at that. How do I make product information data centralized and manageable or customer data or whatever the things are.

Speaker 0 | 17:58.162

You’re playing an orchestra. That’s actually, I just used that metaphor in our all staff meeting that I just hosted this week to convey it to our staff. I was like, what we’re doing is, you can think of this as building an orchestra. And as we’ve grown, the orchestra has gotten out of tune. And we need to bring in new players. We need to bring in, you know, sometimes new, you know, tune up the instruments we have. Sometimes bring in additional instruments to expand to meet us where we’re at. And then the enterprise architecture is like the sheet music that tells us how we’re going to do it. Ah.

Speaker 1 | 18:28.227

That is a good analogy. Doug, I love that. That’s great. Analogies are good. I mean, it’s important on these large transformations, right? Because you want everyone engaged and how can they understand it? The analogy I’ve used recently is Lego blocks. And that’s one that’s been used before, but to talk about the concept of composability. And, you know, so in large enterprises, right, you figure out how to build systems in a composable way because Hopefully we’ve learned in the last however many decades of doing IT that you can’t build one big system that does it all. We started that way with the mainframe, right? Systems became distributed, but now it’s like, how does it all fit together? So the best you can do is create blast radiuses that are kind of nice, right? Make nice API layers around things, build things that are self-contained that do business functions that interact well with other things. that are self-contained do business functions right and i was just going to add one little fun anecdote is yeah i used to spend so much time trying to figure all that out and in the mid-size company um just the concept of lego blocks it almost works better because um you know for sure there’s less there’s less pieces but the pieces that exist they might even be more cobbled together right but they’re composable just by virtue of being cobbled together So when you’re doing a transformation, say, in a large enterprise, like this is my experience, like having done spent years doing that previously, you. You know, you’re trying to unwind systems that have taken years to kind of get to where they’re at. And they’re so big and there’s so many thousands of people using them and all that stuff. And it’s so hard to put the genie back in the bottle. And whereas now in a smaller company, right, you still have maybe even worse, you know, skunk works and things that put things together. But the. The design of having a blast radius where you can take, say, these custom applications and these different systems and bundle them together and say, you know what, I’m going to transform just this section of the business instead of the whole business. Like, I think you have more opportunity, maybe even in that midsize company. At least that’s what I’m finding, because, you know, the transformation work that, you know, again, you know, years of work and you’re like, did I move the needle? Did we actually do what do we actually accomplish? Well, we can do it so much quicker, but it’s also because. It’s more composable, I feel like, by the nature of just how the business, maybe this is manufacturing as well, right? Systems are disjointed and so forth. It’s almost like you were rewarded for having built poor systems when you actually do the full transformation. It was a weird new realization I had in the last year. Like, this is awesome. I would have spent years trying to figure out how to transform this and put in new ERP, like you’re talking about new systems. But instead, it’s actually pretty straightforward. You know, like here’s exactly where you would cut this particular area off from this area. And here’s these systems. Let’s couple them together and replace them with, you know, a new simpler platform. Right. Because you’re trying to consolidate still and make things simple.

Speaker 0 | 21:44.975

Yeah. And, you know, simplicity in in your configurations like this. I’ve actually run into this in our organization, my current organization, where we would we think about. We look at some of the decisions that were made. So at one point, we were like, oh, we’ll make a decision about how we bill for projects. And then we let this one small piece of our organization drive how we decided to do it for everyone. And we mentioned about blast radius and stuff like that. So we implemented this process. This was before my time. So I’m now kind of like, I don’t want to say cleaning it up, but I am. This is part of the changeover from our current systems. you know, an older silo type of environment to a more integrated plan set up where things are intentionally built to work together, you know, if not the same system, but at least to work together with an overarching like idea about how they fit together. And we would make decisions about one thing that had all this other secondary impact, you know, hey, look, we have a team of consultants, and they need to be able to build consulting time. So, but we, you know, the the that’s only like 20 of our business 80 of our business doesn’t have to do it but it’s complicated enough that it’ll give us more visibility if everyone tracks their time really detailed right so that all of a sudden we imposed across the whole organization this like effort to track time and the consequences of doing it only became apparent as time went on you know like You’re, you know, a lowering of compliance with like timesheet entry, a, you know, how accurate is the time that they’re actually submitting and the time cost of doing the entry that they weren’t doing before. You know, individually, it’s only a couple of minutes a person, but like an aggregate, it turns into a pretty large chunk of the business day. So, um. You know, I think of what I’m going to relate this back to is I’m going to grab a copy of a book here. You know, the listeners can’t see me on video, but do this. But there’s a book in this space of enterprise architecture. You’ve probably read it. So have you read Enterprise Architecture as Strategy?

Speaker 1 | 24:03.424

I have not read this book, but I’ve read excerpts from it because it’s a Harvard business. You know, there’s there’s pieces of that that have been disseminated. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 24:11.528

Yeah. So like that book is like the. It’s kind of like the forefather book, I don’t know how to describe it, for enterprise architecture. It was written in the mid-2000s. And the concepts of it and the tenets built the idea of enterprise architecture. But enterprise architecture itself kind of fell out of favor as a concept. Through the 2010s here, in the late 2010s, it was all like, oh, we got to move faster. So it’s agile. You know, everybody, oh, we’re going to do agile stuff. We’re going to see what that is. And enterprise architecture and the EA function was, I perceive it fell out of favor because it was viewed as a slow. it encouraged slowness in a certain way. And that’s absolutely true because it encouraged intentionality. You know, you were, the goal was to be intentional about what you’re doing, not to just do it because you can.

Speaker 1 | 25:12.101

Right. It’s like the pendulum going back and forth. Same with project management, right? How many companies have distributed or just, you know, what’s the word, broken down or maybe simplified their project management offices. And then you go back 20 years ago and it was the PMBOK and you got to do it and follow all the rules. And it kind of reminds me of like what you’re talking about, the time tracking. Right. I’ve been through that, too, in different organizations. Like how much rigor and control do you have versus flexibility and speed? And that’s always a moving thing. And it’s sort of like it’s it’s I think it’s contextual, like with with the time, the era, the company, you know, size of company. But it has to be right because otherwise things don’t work. And I think that’s kind of what happened with EA, right? It became overbuilt. Of course, when people invest in something, they become like experts. It becomes their discipline, their life, their craft. It’s easy to forget like, you know, that there’s other stuff outside of that and what that’s really impacting because, you know, I could see EA practitioners just being interested in getting their documentation done and having all their keys to their kingdom just done just perfectly. But it’s a compromise, right? And I want to say that’s something that I think a lot of us have learned in recent years, very recent years, is all of the systems thinking, it all has been kind of unraveled through agility, which has kind of permeated every company, right? Yeah. But then you have to pull it back to have some level of rigor. You know, you have to have some intentionality. I love your verbiage there. Like, it is about intentionality. And it’s so funny to me. The thing that I always reset on if I see this as off as I go, okay, you just need the minimum viable version of that. Like, for instance, you’re talking about decisioning, right? Like, do you have a breadcrumb? Is there something that shows you made that decision? If the answer is no, okay, you have nothing. So what is the minimum thing that you need, right? Say, go for a project, right? Oh, we just kind of fly by the seat of our pants. Okay, I understand that you don’t like project plans, right? Or big architectures, right? You know, following these things. But do you have anything? Okay, now what is the thing you have? Then the next step is, is it good enough? Right? Because you probably put a little bit of effort into it. And you have to move it just up enough. And then it just is just good enough. I’m like, look, you could do that with everything that you do. I feel like this could be a philosophy, right? I mean, honestly, it’s kind of how I follow. Because otherwise you kind of… Waste a lot of time, right? You build so much process and so much organization and structure, which is great. But it’s like the effort wasn’t even worth it. And it has all these counter influences that are negative outcomes.

Speaker 0 | 27:53.425

So it’s the enemy of good.

Speaker 1 | 27:56.068

Yes. Yeah, exactly. And but this constant battle with all of these approaches and systems, I think, is kind of where we’re at. And understanding like what we’re talking about, I think, is a is a key foundational leadership capability that I feel like. current modern leaders should have. And honestly, some humility too, because you’re going to find you’re off. I ride in on my high horse sometimes on things where I’m like, this is how it’s been, and I have so much experience, and this is the approach. And I’m like, wait a minute, look at how people are responding to this thing. And it’s awesome. I mean, technically, it’s probably the correct thing, but it’s not actually getting the result. And you have to go back to reality. And this is, of course, the lesson of agility, right? You go, Reality is what dictates things, not me. Just because I came up with all the cool ideas or learned the frameworks or whatever doesn’t mean they’re going to be the right thing to do. Reality is always the one that’s teaching us the lesson. And I think there’s a like, again, I go back to humility. I think there’s a humility in that because I’ve been humbled many times with, you know, cool approaches to things that were I thought for sure were the way it was going to work. And then actually I had to adjust.

Speaker 0 | 29:07.184

Yeah, I call those the hot takes. And I’ve learned, the way I end up doing it now is I’ll come in with certain things and I’ll be like, okay, so my hot take is this. And I’m willing to have my hot take be like, not the way we do it or not the way we go. But like, you know, that way it kind of injects a certain amount of humor into the whole thing. So it comes in with the idea that it’s okay to challenge me if we think it’s appropriate. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to push back or we’re going to have it back and forth, you know. So, and I think… to the other piece you brought up like how you show up is you know you come in hot you come in in on your high horse and like how you show up is like critical to the acceptance part of this too you know you can have the best idea you show up poorly like they’re like yeah whatever man that’s that you know take jacob’s coming here coming in you

Speaker 1 | 29:55.159

know i love what you’re saying too about humor i was i i get reminded of this because sometimes i get kind of serious because especially when you’re thinking about like transformations and you’re like we got to get all this done you know here’s our three-year plan and it’s gonna you know it’s business differentiating stuff right it’s hugely strategic it will change the direction of the company and you know you’ll beat the competition all that stuff um where was i going with that totally lost my train of thought there you go oh oh no it was it was about humor just that’s something i’m always reminded of is like humor it has to be injected into your work and i also think of course like we’re talking about culture right that’s a big thing um but i think it’s important Just to make sure there’s some just really goofy stuff sometimes. So people realize it’s not because it’s so serious, right? To work often is right. So I like, I like what you’re saying about just, just making it like lighthearted and even giving people a cue to, Hey, it’s my hot take. You know, they know they can challenge it and you, and they know you’ll probably make fun of the thing that you, you were, you know, was your edict or whatever out of the, out of the gate. Right.

Speaker 0 | 31:03.232

Yeah, absolutely. So, but I’m going to. change directions for a second here let’s explore i’d love to explore a little bit more about you and kind of your history so everyone has different stories about how they came to be in whether it’s your leadership but i want to talk more broadly about like being in tech so you know you’re a tech leader but how did you come to be in it did you set out like like when you were like five were your parents like jacob’s got jacob’s got all the computer knowledge and he’s taking and pulling apart everything or were you going to be like an architect

Speaker 1 | 31:35.218

and then you fell into it like tell us a story let us let us uh understand more about how you came to be where you are yeah sure um honestly i mean this is probably the case for a lot of people but video games back when i was a kid like again in charlie 2600 that’s like one of those that’s one of the coolest man you play pitfall hell hell yeah yeah pitfall all day pitfall pitfall two not pitfall yeah you’re right two is definitely the superior one you I mean, there’s so many cool games like that. But yeah, just always loving that burgeoning technology that happened in the 80s. I’d say there was such a big thing as a kid. That was what I remember. So I always loved it and was attracted to it. I can’t imagine what it’s like for kids now. The level of tech they get with their video games and stuff is just mind-blowing. And I still play those video games. Um, but so I always kind of liked it. And I remember the moment where I probably the first inkling that I wanted to work on computers is, and, uh, you know, I was in one of these like, uh, library, uh, type of scenarios where our library had one computer. Like, so we’re not talking, you know, big city school here,

Speaker 0 | 32:45.067

but had one public library, the school library.

Speaker 1 | 32:48.248

This was like the school library. Yeah. Public library probably only had one as well, but, but it was, you know, I’m sure it was an Apple two GS or some old, really old computer. I don’t even know, maybe predated that, but, um, they were like, here’s what it, here’s what a computer is class type of thing. And, and, uh, you know, so the whole class of maybe 30 kids or something, they were showing us this program called Dr. Spade. So now this is one of these like really early level, you know, text driven programs, but Dr. Spade. So is basically, it’s a therapist. It’s, it’s pretends to be a therapist. And what it does is it asks you questions and it’s like, how are you doing? Oh, I’m doing good. And as you talk to it, it’s, it’s trying to like, you know, it’s trying to worm information out of you. And then basically like it regurgitates a lot of it back. So it’s almost like a, a punchline in a way. Cause what, you know, a therapist joke would be the therapist just ask questions and they never really, you know, talk or do anything. They just listen to you talk. Right. And that’s the, that’s like the process. So it was kind of funny the program was doing that, but I realized like the whole class had left and I had been hitting this thing with questions and trying to understand, you know, how it was operating. Like what the, there’s clearly a tree structure and some kind of logic and how was it doing this? And so, yeah, so I just spent all this time until I kind of understood and found its flaws. And from that moment, right, I was like, wow, that was so cool. And what’s ironic about that too is think about that. That was like pretending to be like AI, you know, way back in the day. Clearly it wasn’t. It was silly comparatively, but the same idea. You want to interact with this computer and have it tell you things about yourself or have a conversation, right? Maybe it’s intelligent. But that fascinated me. And, you know, from then on, I was just like a computer nerd. So, you know, it was pretty obvious when I got out of high school, you know. I started a gaming place with some friends of mine out on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin. So this kind of was like the very early, like you had Doom and then Quake, right? Those early games where it was, I would say, pre-internet.

Speaker 0 | 34:57.682

So you set up LAN parties.

Speaker 1 | 34:59.704

Essentially, yeah. We set up a big old LAN party. And it was funny because people still remember that because it was… It was a marquee landmark kind of thing because nothing existed like it at the time. So it was ahead of its time. But we were only able to run that for a few years because, well, pretty soon everyone got the Internet. So that wasn’t going to last forever.

Speaker 0 | 35:20.394

It was like those Internet cafes that, you know, you’re like, I got a new business. I’m going to run an Internet cafe. Like by like six, seven years later, that was you were definitely not running an Internet cafe if you didn’t do anything else.

Speaker 1 | 35:33.074

Exactly. I even know people that did that. I’m like, yeah, and it didn’t last. But yeah, you just don’t know the technology moves so quick. But yeah, so that’s kind of my, I mean, that’s kind of part of my story. But yeah, I got into, you know, I was on the Microsoft Windows 95 launch team. So that was kind of my first job out of high school.

Speaker 0 | 35:51.282

So what does that entail? Like what does being on the launch team mean?

Speaker 1 | 35:56.864

It means like this product hasn’t been released. It’s going to be released, say, in a year. And there’s just this massive ramp up. And I want to say that was a big technology jump at the time, right? Windows 95 was such a big shift in how many people used computers, how you interfaced with the internet. It had a web browser, you know, all these things that didn’t exist before that. And yeah, so we, you know, they hired a massive amount of people. But yeah, I was on that launch team. So that means you’re taking calls before it’s even released, right? You have the beta releases and things like that. And then finally, it releases and… Now you’re technical support. So that was kind of my first, you know, IT job. And then from there, I just kind of went through a lot of different jobs. And ultimately I spent probably, I want to say close to 10 years about as an IT consultant, just implementing systems and networks. And, you know, you had Microsoft, Novell, Cisco, you know, all the, all the things that rolled up through the nine, late nineties into the early two thousands and, uh, and then shifted into leadership. So like. That’s kind of my leadership stories. I would say I was always the smart, I’ll call it, you know, a little bit of a computer nerd that loved to build the things. And I would go into companies, a lot of them Fortune 500 companies, and I would see how things were being run. And, you know, of course, when you’re young, you sort of overestimate your abilities maybe and things like that. But I kind of saw a lot of middle management that operated these teams and ran these projects. And I was like, why are we doing it this way? It’s just so inefficient or sloppy or, you know, just, you know, things that I saw I could improve. And so, yeah, after about, I want to say that 10 year mark, I took a job as a IT manager. And that was that was my my shift, I would say, from, you know, the actual practitioner executor to now leading teams and trying to build, you know, the scaffolding right to, you know, make scalable systems and, you know, all that good stuff.

Speaker 0 | 37:57.598

Hmm. That’s great. And you actually, you jumped, you jumped me right to my next question, which you pretty much already answered, which is when did you feel like you became a leader? I mean, if you want to elaborate a little more on that, that’d be great. But like, you know, you made that transition from being the team member to being the leader. You talk about when you made the official jump, but when did you realize and what made you realize like I could be a leader and this is what I could do and why I want to do it?

Speaker 1 | 38:22.751

Honestly, I think, I think it probably was, you know, pretty early on just. As a consultant, I guess I did lead consulting projects where you have a team of people. You’re selling services, and then you’re implementing things for large companies. So just having some of that leadership acumen with those smaller teams in those situations, even though maybe I wasn’t managing staff or anything like that. I definitely knew I had the skills to think about other people and how… I’ll just say one thing that always, if I go back to a very simple thing that stuck out to me was, I was always thinking about whatever team I was on, how the other team members could work better with me. And I would go above and beyond, right? Hey, let’s all use a central repository and let’s all work off the same documents. Let’s all try to follow this thing that’s going to make us all work better together. But I was always so focused on that. And it was strange that not everyone was, right? You have all sorts of different types of people. But yeah, that was always my vision and sort of impulse because just deep in my heart, I just want everybody to work together. And I feel, of course, I believe that the more people, the less boundaries they have, the closer they work and the more that they work together and can share and feel not like closed or holding on to their stuff. Then I think the smarter the team becomes. you know, just like a note nodes in, uh, you know, in a brain, you know, like we become a bigger brain if we can work better together. So I was always of that belief, like, you know, without really concrete evidence and, and sort of built that, um, knowledge of that, that does work, you know, in those early kind of years. And that’s part of what led me to go, man, I should lead teams. Cause I enjoy that. I really like, I like bringing people together and, you know, having bigger outcomes because we’ve somehow, you know, we’ve somehow what’s the word like we’ve we’ve crossed over our individual worlds in some and we’ve become something greater than than the sum of the parts right and you can feel it in a really high performing team you can feel it and the energy goes up as well so obstacles go down energy goes up people um people become smarter it’s weird like i know i do like like if i have a group of people i’m working with and they all are really open-minded and they’re really enthusiastic and they’re working in that really collaborative capacity yeah i mean i’m getting ideas so rapidly from them and vice versa and we’re just coming up with stuff and you go man if if it was each of us going and doing that ourselves we wouldn’t even gone like a tenth of what we got as an output you know in terms of what was the solution how do we how fast could we do something so Yeah, I think there’s a lot to say about how those pieces play together, but it’s a very simple concept that you can almost feel when you’re just a team member on a team. And I always, you know, even those early days kind of felt that, right? You’re in a team where it’s not cohesive and you don’t have that sort of, you know, collaboration and that, you know, vision of how that works or people trying to do that.

Speaker 0 | 41:41.462

This is this, you know, to use the, to use one of those executive buzzwords, right? The synergy, the synergy. It is. Everybody working together. yeah synergy that’s right so this is why we’re coming up towards the end of the our our episode here but uh just a couple of more questions about things first i want to ask uh just a fun question is there can you tell us something that people wouldn’t expect of you about you you know something you did in the past something in history or something like that and i’ll i’ll i always like throw out an example just to let people know i was once in the macy’s day parade as a kid oh yeah That’s cool. People would know that. Is there something about you, something you do?

Speaker 1 | 42:24.075

I mean, I have hobbies. I play the piano, stuff like that. But that’s not… I would say what’s interesting that probably not a lot of people know is when I was a kid, this is kind of a weird thing to say, but I’m going to give you something. Throw a curveball here.

Speaker 0 | 42:42.325

All right.

Speaker 1 | 42:43.666

But I actually died for 10 minutes. I was dead for 10 minutes.

Speaker 0 | 42:48.108

No way. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 42:49.349

It’s confirmed dead. Like to the point where I was just left in a room to, you know, with ash and gray, you know, just dead. And, uh, and everyone had just given up. They were like, okay, I was at a, a smaller like hospital clinic, um, just from, uh, uh, uh, head fracture. Yeah. So, so that’s why I’m the way I am now. But

Speaker 0 | 43:15.724

but uh but no i uh so i was gonna say that was that’s an unusual thing to come back from that is like maybe like you don’t mind me asking like how old were you when that happened like were you like an infant or it’s like like i was three i was three years old so i was pretty young yeah that is that is a fascinating story like it i mean i i’ll say it’s fascinating because it seems that everything worked out so like you know that that that part was okay uh you get to tell the story afterwards about that you know like like that’s that’s almost as crazy as is like it it and i usually don’t i don’t use this as an example on the podcast because it’s too it and i’m only going to bring it up because yours is so good but i delivered i once delivered i delivered one of my children in my car no yes that is bananas are you kidding me that’s right so so now so i i there was like a podcast like six months ago where i i didn’t even think about it i just kind of used that as an example the guy’s like oh dude i can’t even compete with that i’m so sorry that’s like you should have your own netflix show you know what i mean like but like like i died for 10 minutes that is that is absolutely banana pants and i’m obviously clearly glad and i think the listeners are clearly glad that it worked out uh but what a wild wild story to be able to share thank you you Yeah. So coming up here now, now we’re really closing up and coming and coming to the end. But for our listeners, what leadership advice do you have? You know, you’ve been through a lot of different, different eras of your leadership journey. You’ve worked for fortune 500 company, 500 companies who work for midsize companies. What would you love to share with listeners who are other it leaders about like, what’s the, what’s important about being a leader? What qualities are important? What things would advice would you give? Yeah, I’ll leave that open-ended.

Speaker 1 | 45:10.681

I would just say, get out of your own way, right? And I’m not picking on anybody in particular. I’m saying this has been my journey, but yeah, it’s humbling at times to be a leader because… um like a phase we go through of course is delegation we’re trying to delegate things and especially a lot of it leaders i’m not saying all of them but you come from a lot of different backgrounds but a lot of them are problem solvers people that maybe did the a lot of the jobs that they’re now overseeing and managing right so it takes a certain kind of you know drive to be that kind of person and then when you’re managing people like that it’s really it’s it’s not always easy to to let go of the reins but but of course autonomy and feeling empowered is what drives all of us as humans, right? I mean, again, I shouldn’t generalize too much. Maybe there’s some people out there that have some issues, they don’t like that. But overall, the best thing you can do is allow people to grow and to stretch in their own way. And even though a lot of times, I’m sure you’ve experienced this, Doug, the output of what they’re doing for maybe something you know really well. isn’t as good as what you yourself could even do now even if your skills got rusty maybe somebody that’s that’s learning but it’s it’s so important to let them just you know get their sea legs and figure out how they’re going to do it and then let them do it a different way and focus on the outcome i’m sure most leaders are are aspiring to to do that but but i think there’s a there’s a importance to being humble and allowing people to do things the way that they need to do them awesome that was really insightful

Speaker 0 | 46:48.426

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

Speaker 1 | 46:53.209

You are so welcome.

Speaker 0 | 46:55.331

So 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. And that’s it. It was so cool.

Speaker 1 | 47:08.201

Man, I’m no longer a podcast virgin.

Speaker 0 | 47:10.944

That’s right. But it’s crazy. Like, so they, so you said you had a head fracture. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 47:17.703

I climbed up a two-story ladder on a, on an apartment complex. I was getting built. So it was just a concrete foundation with the concrete walls. And I literally just fell over the ladder cause I was flapping my arms. You know, your kid, you don’t really realize the danger of what you’re doing. And I fell and I remember falling, but boy, I have fragmented memories after that waking up and excruciating pain, vomiting, you know what I mean? And, uh, and yeah. And then finally coming back you know the thing i didn’t say on there too is i actually had an out-of-body experience oh right yeah so there you go so three years old out-of-body experience you still remember it i remember in fact what’s interesting about it because i was definitely i was a avowed atheist for most of my adult life that’ll change pretty rapidly for me but but i had kind of what do you call it um i have i had talked myself out of the experience i had i remember it so damn vividly But I was like, oh, that was a dream or that couldn’t have been. But there’s so many things that happened when I turned pretty much as an adult that started to haunt me about it. Like I never talked to anybody about it. And I thought, surely that has to be a dream because I was just on one of those little clinic tables where you got the paper. You know, they roll the paper and you put it in a little room and nobody was there. And I’m looking down at myself and I’m like, and I remember exactly my thoughts. I was like, I remember feeling like, OK, is the ceiling holding me here? Why am I here? And I also. was about to look up and I was like kind of curious and I was like and I just kind of knew not to and just to hold steady yeah and I just remember that and anyway so this is a really boring kind of experience right it wasn’t like the hospital all these things but I pictured it was like on tv when you know you got the hospital shows and the doctors have the masks and the lights and they’re all in your face because I mean I’m dying of course I died like of course they’re doing that turns out no they couldn’t get me to a hospital quick enough so it was a clinic and the doctor wasn’t available and it was like during bad weather and all these things that led to like basically where I should have died but so I didn’t really talk about that and then finally I told I told uh somebody in my family I think it might have been my mom about this kind of experience or whatever I think I was asking I was like tell me more about kind of what that was like and they described it oh yeah we we just we couldn’t do anything so we just left you on that table and everybody just left and they were like you know obviously traumatized right like this little kid died but There was nobody in the room, so it just corroborated my own personal experience. I was like, oh my God, what does that mean? That’s crazy. That ultimately led me to a greater understanding, I think, of reality. I have my own beliefs and things, but you can’t really prove them unless you have an experience of some sort. That was my opening to experience something a little bit outside of the nuts and bolts of just what people accept as reality.

Speaker 0 | 50:07.376

That’s crazy. I appreciate you sharing. Thank you. I’m just thinking of the logistics here. They’re like, oh my god, he’s dead. People go cry. They’re consoling your parents, your mother, whatever the case may be. And within a few minutes, somebody comes back in and they’re like… Wait a minute. He’s not actually dead.

Speaker 1 | 50:27.408

It was. Yeah, it was. I think it was my mom because she actually went in the bathroom. So my dad left. There was a there was a nurse that was like frantic and whatever. And she I mean, I don’t know where she was, but but she she she was like in the bathroom, you know, because there’s like one attached in that little room. And she’s just like praying. But I mean, she’s in denial, of course, like the stage of the grave. Right. She’s like, oh, my God, this can’t have happened. And yeah. And then she came out, but it was, well, you know, just over 10 minutes for sure that I had, that I was left there, you know, cause I’d stopped breathing. And then, um, all of a sudden I started breathing again. So, wow.

Speaker 0 | 51:08.101

That’s amazing. That’s good.

Speaker 1 | 51:09.442

That’s fun.

Speaker 0 | 51:12.264

Yeah. Yeah. You know, that’s not a story everybody gets to tell. Um,

Speaker 1 | 51:17.369

so I was, I was going to say something about NetSuite. Um, I am actually investigating NetSuite versus. D365, Microsoft Dynamics, versus some other…

Speaker 0 | 51:28.359

What’s that?

Speaker 1 | 51:31.140

Oh, yeah, you like NetSuite?

Speaker 0 | 51:33.120

Well, so we went through a pretty extensive process ourselves. Actually, not because I care about it being on the recording, but just so they don’t have a whole giant recording, I’m going to stop the recording. Sure,

Speaker 1 | 51:42.683

sure.

Speaker 0 | 51:43.403

Yes.