Speaker 0 | 00:04.077
Hi, nerds. I’m Michael Moore, hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m here with Mark Ellestat, Director of IT and Digital Transformation at Moses Lake Industries and co-founder of Better Tools LLC. That’s a mouthful. Mark, how are you doing today?

Speaker 1 | 00:20.764
I’m doing very well. It is a beautiful fall evening here. And yeah, yeah, I couldn’t be happier. End of the workday for me. So it’s nice to leave work and go into a nice, fun conversation about careers and IT and all that stuff.

Speaker 0 | 00:41.039
It’s great to have you on the program. We’re going to jump right in. We’re going to start off with our icebreaker segment. It’s called Random Access Memories. I ask a question and then you just respond with the answer that pops in your head first. Right. And your first question. is if you could work or collaborate with any IT-related company or organization, what would it be and why?

Speaker 1 | 01:07.007
Microsoft. The reason why, so I’ve been in the gig for, and it doesn’t feel like a long time, but it’s like 20 years now. And I’ve seen Microsoft in the past. Especially like the last five years, they’ve gone from like the monolithic sort of, you know, black box software company into this sort of open, freewheeling organization that’s just like they’re just a fire hose of new apps and capabilities. And it’s the way it’s all built around. shared platform in the dataverse. It’s very exciting to me. And when I’ve spent my whole career either working for small or mid-sized companies, they’re one of the only large technology companies where I’d like to see how enterprise size works with whatever they’ve got going on that lets them have rapid innovation. That would be a fun learning experience.

Speaker 0 | 02:22.776
That was a great response. Microsoft is a fantastic example of a company that just keeps evolving and evolving and evolving. They’re definitely not who they were when they first started, and they’ve come a long way. And the mere fact that they can just keep reinventing themselves and stay on topic. Yeah, Microsoft’s a really, really interesting thing. We might chat about them a little bit later. Yeah, great. Great collaboration. I agree. That would be a very, very interesting one to work with. What is the most, I guess, weird or creepy IT related thing that you’ve encountered or experienced?

Speaker 1 | 03:09.478
Creepy IT related? Well,

Speaker 0 | 03:10.839
I mean, it was just Halloween not that long ago. So I had to throw something in here, right?

Speaker 1 | 03:16.041
You know how often in IT land there’s always this thing like, what is IT, right? And… For some of us, what is IT means like it could be anything with electricity, it could be anything with a screen, whatever. So my group at one time or another has wound up in charge of handheld radios, like, you know, walkie talkie type things where you’ve got networks of these. And there was an issue one time where people are out. So we’ll get into it later. But, you know, a lot of my career has been in manufacturing, supporting manufacturing environments. So you think oil and gas type. processes and piping and hazardous environments and things like that. Well, they had an issue where these guys are going out into the process and every time they would call out on their radio, it would trip alarms in the sensors controlling the process. These are not wireless. They’re not Bluetooth. They’re not anything like that. They’re like temperature, pressure, RPM sensors inside of a, again, process manufacturing facility. And- Somebody goes and says, you know, hey, is Bob there? And alarms in another building start going off. And that was pretty creepy. Now, it’s not creepy. Honestly, it was fun because when I saw that come in, because it was like a safety related thing, right? Like some of the one of the guys on my team, he was he was kind of like, oh, man, I don’t know. And this is crazy. And I’m just like excited in a weird way because it’s so weird. I’m like. all right this is this is gonna be great and yeah so I got to learn about RFID, you know, signal attenuation. And I think it turned out there was like a change that they had made. And they basically accidentally made a giant antenna by how they, you know, our facilities team had deployed some wiring. And that’s what it was. So that was pretty weird and recent enough that I can actually remember it.

Speaker 0 | 05:27.262
There you go. That’s a good one. That’s a good one. You don’t, you don’t generally see like a, like a giant, uh, antenna being made and messing with, uh, uh, messing with it equipment and sensors and stuff. So that’s pretty neat. Um, all right. That, that one doesn’t solve that one. Here’s your last one. If you could rename or rebrand any it related term or concept, what would it be and why

Speaker 1 | 05:54.781
Microsoft copilot? So Microsoft used the word co-pilot in 80 different places, and it’s not the same thing,

Speaker 0 | 06:04.424
and it drives me nuts.

Speaker 1 | 06:08.427
Maybe I’m not Microsoft.

Speaker 0 | 06:10.088
It’ll be rebranded. It’s Microsoft. You know, Microsoft rebrands the same thing, you know, three times a year, right? So Microsoft’s marketing, it must be like, you know what? It’s been three months. We need a new name for. for Azure AD. Let’s name it Entra. Let’s give it a name that multiple people will pronounce differently. It’ll be named something else a year from now, right?

Speaker 1 | 06:39.551
Just wait. You just wait. Takes care of itself.

Speaker 0 | 06:46.314
Great to have you on. Let’s talk about first, before we get into Moses Lake Industries, let’s talk about this What is Better Tools LLC? So

Speaker 1 | 06:58.679
Better Tools is a, you know, consulting, coaching company. Like, I think like a lot of mid-career professionals, right? You kind of get bored and you start doing some soul searching. I went through an MBA program mid-career. And part of the capstone process for that, you have to do some career searching type stuff. And… As part of that, I did some work where I’ve always had more than one job. So while I’ve worked, I’ve been a writer. I’ve been a teacher. I’ve volunteered for SCORE, which is a small business assistance organization that’s funded by the federal government. And Better Tools is really just an outlet of that. And it’s… to be honest, kind of just a sandbox for things that I think are fun to do. So like I’ve done executive coaching through that, I’ve done workshops on leadership for different folks, and I’ve done software development. So I really don’t like, for example, the typical performance evaluation process at most companies. And so I went, wow, why don’t I make a little tool that… you know, helps integrate some of the things that I think are important from coaching and leadership and mentorship and try to be nice enough to the HR folks. So maybe they’ve let people use it, you know? So really that it’s just, it’s a, it’s a fun project bucket that to your idea generator. Yeah.

Speaker 2 | 08:49.514
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Speaker 1 | 11:32.724
Hey, it’s Greg, the Frenchman secretly managing the podcast behind the curtain. To request a one-on-one call, contact us at internet at popularit.net. And remember, it will never cost you a dime.

Speaker 0 | 11:45.508
Yeah, no, I love that. I love that for you. Okay, so director of IT and digital transformation, Moses Lake Industries. What is Moses Lake Industries?

Speaker 1 | 11:57.615
Moses Lake Industries is a chemical manufacturing company for the semiconductor industry. So when you think of chemical manufacturers, right, you think of chemical manufacturing. The fun part about this business is the semiconductor manufacturing industry is actually very, like, it’s huge. But it’s also very small. You have a very, very small number of companies that actually manufacture chips, memory processors, things like that. You’ve got Intel, Samsung, Micron, TSMC, and a handful of others. And that’s it. Basically, every gizmo on the planet is made using the fabs owned by those companies. And… Moses Lake Industries is embedded in all of those. So if you’ve got an iPhone, Moses Lake Industries made products that made that. You know, the primary processors and memory and GPUs all work. Every time somebody goes and uses ChatGPT, those clusters, they’re made by TSMC. And because that’s who NVIDIA uses to do contract manufacturing. And those products are all made with our chemistries. So it’s a mid-sized company, around 500 people. I joined when there was about 80 staff members in the company. And, you know, it’s kind of cool because it’s a fairly rural, small company. But you, yeah, pretty much every piece of modern… Computer technology is, to quote the Intel staff, that’s got MLI inside. That’s kind of fun.

Speaker 0 | 14:03.027
Wow, there’s so much to that. So my brain is going about 80 miles an hour trying to figure out where to go with that. So your job in there, being that… It’s not just direct IT. Digital transformation has popped in there. My brain is wrapping my head around what digital transformation looks like for chemical manufacturing, you know, essentially.

Speaker 1 | 14:33.413
So it’s a very interesting question, actually. Manufacturing in general. So if you think back over the last five to 10 years, maybe 15 years. So there was a… big thing right in it where the ideas of like agile and devops and things from the software development side started to penetrate into it operations and then it went from there and started to penetrate like business right at large like you’ve got um Actually, things like the OKR methodology, you know, that came from Intel and then it went from Intel to Google because an executive, you know, wrote a book about it, went over there. And so you started seeing all these all this penetration of this software development mindset and manufacturing companies in the United States are currently discovering the same principles that large service type customers. companies discovered, you know, five to 10 years ago with agile methodologies, solutions, you know, results focused, quick iterative decision making. And it’s all being driven by the possibilities of robotic automation combined with the strength of AI analysis, like a lot of other industries. But So inside of chemical manufacturing, I would say digital transformation looks about like it did for everybody else five years ago. Because the industry as a whole, your incentives are very different, right? Nobody wants to be at the leading edge because everything is about quality and consistency when you’re working in ultra high purity manufacturing. chemical manufacturing for the semiconductors. Like the products that these companies make, making a modern computer chip is one of, if not the most complicated endeavors human beings have ever done. The number of process steps is absurd. The cost of the equipment is absurd. And if you screw anything up, it shows up in defect rates, which… is very expensive. So the industry as a whole, very change averse. And yet, AI combined with the thought processes of agile decision making, I mean, companies that are adopting that they just they absolutely eat the lunch of companies that don’t. So you see some of these leading edge manufacturing companies adopting this stuff and doing just amazing things. And everybody else is like, wow, we have to figure out how to be able to achieve those results, implement these things. But you’ve got a whole stack of people who have spent their careers very rigid about change, very detailed about like you have to know exactly what’s going to happen before you make something different. So the short version is digital transformation in manufacturing is a lot about. education. And it’s a lot about being a salesperson for the idea that you can change fast and often without making everything fall apart and then needing to prove it over and over and over.

Speaker 0 | 18:15.776
I love that. It’s a great way. You can change fast, right? And often. Uh, and, and most of the time when you do that, right, you end up, um, you end up screwing things up. You end up making mistakes and stuff, but I like how you put it, right. Cause you combine it with an agile methodology on top of that. So adding in the, the right way to kind of step through fast, um, it changes it. Right. So it’s not just, uh, fast for no reason, you know, it’s, uh,

Speaker 1 | 18:49.720
it’s, it’s changing fast and failing. in non-catastrophic ways quickly and trying to change the mindset so that failure isn’t bad anymore. It’s just catastrophic failure is bad, but you really need to get folks comfortable with the idea that the reason why you make rapid incremental change instead of making everything perfect and then doing a change all at once is because… If you’re doing really rapid incremental change and you fail, it’s okay. When you do big change and you fail, it’s a disaster. So the challenge is really working with people to convince them, and this gets into more of an opinion, I suppose, than any kind of law. I don’t believe it’s possible to succeed in change in the modern. business environment unless you are doing very rapid change. You have to be fast because other people are being fast. And if you can’t figure out… how to get comfortable with a lot more chaos than an industry like mine has been used to historically. You’re just not competitive with the folks that figure out how to do that.

Speaker 0 | 20:15.732
I like that. I mean, it makes complete sense. It sounds like you’re essentially limiting the scope of the changes and reducing the complexity of the rollback or the fix to be able to… accelerate you know accelerate through and not be hurt so badly by by a change hey oh we messed it up great they’ll be fixed in the next cycle so yeah so that makes that makes a little more sense the um you know yeah i you know i always look at i always kind of scour the linkedin profiles uh for things uh on here um and uh one thing that i i saw there’s a couple things i want to bring this up because it’s really interesting uh immediately i saw that your banner And not only your banner, but also your profile picture, a huge cat fan, right?

Speaker 1 | 21:13.431
Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 21:14.352
Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 21:15.013
So I kind of started doing that. So I was a teacher for six years doing nights and weekends at the local community college for computer science and project management. And. One of the things I learned is to be an effective teacher, you have to be an effective entertainer because maybe it’s different if you’re teaching like, you know, elite level classes, you know, far into a thing. But I was teaching kids that are like, well, not even kids, people who were either fresh out of high school or they were doing job retraining. And a lot of times they’re doing job retraining because the government told them they had to not. because they were like, I want to have a career in IT. So maintaining people’s engagement, really rough. And I do like cats, but I started this shtick where everything was about cats because at the time, well, I mean, still, right? Like cats are a big thing, you know?

Speaker 0 | 22:23.349
Cats are a big thing.

Speaker 1 | 22:24.150
Cat memes, all that stuff. So yeah. Like when I was teaching about computer science, I would, you know, we wouldn’t just start talking about TCP versus UDP. I would pull up a live video stream of my cats at home and show them like this is a UDP stream, blah, blah, blah, and use that just as a conversation icebreaker to then roll into it. And it was just always cats, cats, cats. And. That just kind of carried over into my LinkedIn profile because I’m actually very serious about my job. But somehow I also combine that with a deliberate sense of irreverence.

Speaker 0 | 23:15.857
Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 23:19.158
I don’t know. It keeps me sane, I suppose.

Speaker 0 | 23:23.819
I am also serious. and then also can get wacky as well. I absolutely love the, I use, you know, I use comparisons and everything all the time when I’m talking. And also I love cats. So there you go. So I appreciate it in all sorts of different ways. Very, no, very, very.

Speaker 1 | 23:46.874
The shirt I believe in my LinkedIn profile says Mary Meowmas.

Speaker 0 | 23:50.537
It does. I thought it was that. I thought it was that when I looked at it. No, and then I saw you were a teacher, which makes sense. Also, when you were talking to me about having to, you have that other thing that works with the better tools, right? That works with folks and helps them coach them up and all that type of stuff. So to me, that makes sense. Why now, right? Because you’ve got that learning in there. You know… We were talking about, prior to this, right, earlier on, we were talking about some things that you’re really good at. And I wanted to kind of bring those up because I thought that one of them kind of relates this immediately, right, which is learning. Anybody, I think, that teaches really, really understands how important it is to keep learning. and stuff um how do you how do you uh um continue learning and then uh coach others to continue learning. Because it is, there’s so much right now. There’s so much stuff. Like I, I go out there and I have too much to, to look at and learn. Like I’m just constantly trying to, you know, shove information into my head and I think it’s running out of room.

Speaker 1 | 25:20.893
Yeah. I think that’s, that’s an interesting, I can’t help it. That’s how I do it. You know, before we, before we started the call, you’d asked me some questions about that and Part of the story about why I started a company and I did different things and I’ve done some coaching is there’s this workbook. When I was doing my MBA, classes did this workbook and it’s called I Believe Designing Your Life is the name of it. And it just walks you through a bunch of different exercises where you’re looking at what gives you energy, what takes energy. doing a bunch of mind mapping, trying to figure things out. And what it comes down to is what do you find yourself energized by and what do you find yourself doing when you’re not trying to do anything? And if you can identify that, can you market it? Can you monetize it? Whatever. And so when you ask that, question like how do i maintain learning when i was going through that process of looking at what energizes me what i found is i’m like sitting in my house and i’m looking around and there’s no it stuff like this is dissecting it nerds all this stuff but i gotta be honest i don’t really like i know guys that are technologists you know like some old gray beard that But, you know, they were doing Unix back before anybody knew what it was or they’ve got their, you know, they’ve got a whole array of Raspberry Pi stuff and they’re like they’re into that. And I’ve never been that way. But so when I’m looking around, it was like I didn’t have IT stuff everywhere, but I had just all these books and everything just about learning and self-improvement and how to figure things out. And. And so for me, it just happens. I indulge my curiosity when I’m curious about something. And professionally, I make that useful because I make sure when I see an interesting opportunity, I will, like when I see a problem, even if it’s not an IT problem, I will allow myself to indulge in the exercise of spending time to figure out like. man, how could I make that better for something? Like, is there something we could do? Is there something I can figure out, something I can offer? And what that’s done for me is not only do I get to learn a lot about IT, even outside of my lane, but I get to learn about other people’s business, their roles, and in turn, by doing that, it lets me offer. solutions that people didn’t even know they had just because i spend the time to learn about them and what that what matters to them and and then that get to go from there advice for people who are trying to learn figure out what you enjoy and find a way to uh you know get paid to do that as much as you can within reason right like work sucks a lot so deal with that you know but um i think for you what you love and

Speaker 0 | 28:53.784
and do what you love and it’s more tolerable. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 28:58.407
Find a way to be doing things that you enjoy doing a good chunk of the time and you don’t have to try as hard to learn.

Speaker 0 | 29:08.094
Well, you know, and it’s interesting because we talked a little bit about things you love doing, right? That’s what we were talking about. And I think I can tie back so many things that you talked about. to your time there where you were a, you know, a professor, you know, essentially having a positive impact on people. Right. You know, your your curiosity, your learning, all of these things that you told me are things you love doing. Right. These are these are things, you know, that a natural person loves to learn and loves to teach. others what they learn, right, would love doing. How does that manifest in your job, your current job right now? How does that manifest?

Speaker 1 | 30:03.455
Really, it manifests by every problem’s interesting. I guess. And so it’s not, for me, it manifests by, I’ve never really felt intimidated with seeing a problem, right? For me, it’s always kind of interesting and exciting. And career-wise, that’s let me, like, I started at the company, you know, I was a technician, right? Doing operating system refreshes and… cleaning mice back when you know they still had a little ball you had to go clean the lint out of the rollers and things like that like that’s the kind of stuff i did but because i’ve had the attitude that when there’s a problem it’s not a it’s not something to be scared of it’s just like man that’s interesting let’s figure it out let’s work together let’s understand what everybody’s trying to solve and then and then help solve the problem, whether it’s an IT solution or not. I think it just shows up in looking for opportunities to help, acting when you can. And the reason my title has digital transformation is because a good portion of my day isn’t actually like… IT operations type work. It’s just, I spend so much time just helping other business leaders try and fix things and make things better that they kind of had to call me something else to justify why I spent half my time running around, you know, just trying to improve the business in lots of ways. So I think it also manifests as not everybody’s comfortable with how I think about things. So probably I can be a bit of a unpleasant disruption for people who really just want to show up and they want to do their thing and they want to go home.

Speaker 0 | 32:25.089
Let’s talk about the methodology, right? Because you mentioned I can be an unpleasant disruption. Usually that means that you’re asking a lot of questions uh and people are like i don’t know man it just works right like i just works like i i don’t i don’t think about these things um let’s talk about the methodology there um when you have a really interesting problem what is the methodology you use uh to to kind of work through that problem because i think some people i’m not all people but some people go i have a problem and they’re like oh you know like it hurts or it hurts their brain but Other people, like, you know, and a lot of people in IT, when they have problems, they’re like, oh, okay, how am I going to handle this one? It’s a challenge, so to speak.

Speaker 1 | 33:11.413
So I think there’s a lot of ways to answer that. I’ll say it sounds like a trivial answer, but it’s actually totally the opposite. And the answer is it depends. Because as I’ve had more senior positions, as the people I’ve worked with, you know. I can give you a very consistent and methodical method to approach a problem if you’re an IT technician trying to solve something. There’s another layer if you are a supervisor, a manager, and you’re trying to start solving people problems. When you start working with the leadership of a company or you are a leader of a company or you’re an owner of a company, what I’ve found to be most effective is you show up. with a problem-solving methodology that is most appropriate to the people in the room and that’s like i said kind of a trivial thing to say but

Speaker 0 | 34:17.696
i think about it yeah how do you determine that right that’s i guess that’s the you know i that’s a great uh um it’s a great thought but i think how do you determine what that is

Speaker 1 | 34:33.516
And I think that’s where it’s like, it’s easy to say, but hard to do, right? Because the real answer is you do that. I guess the short answer is you do that by paying attention to the person who’s talking and actually caring. There’s a, so one of the leadership resources I’ve always really liked is Jocko Willink, right? And he’s got a particular style. But one of the things that I’ve always really carried with ownership is. He talks about, like, there was a question that came in, and the question is basically, like, how do you convince people that you care, right? Like, how do you get them to trust you that you care enough to solve their problems? And the short answer is, well, you care. And that doesn’t mean you… Fake it. It means like if I’m talking to you right now and you’re telling me about a problem and, you know, I’m I’m already home, I’m already home, I’m already thinking about what’s for dinner. I really don’t care. Like, you know, you could have a very small problem to me, whatever. What you do is you stop and you go, no, you need to care about this conversation and this person and what. He wants what he’s trying to get. And you’ve actually got to put yourself in that mental space and you’ve got to lean in and you’ve got to listen and pay attention and ask questions that help you understand what the person cares about, what they’re trying to, like, not even what they’re trying to achieve, what they want to feel when they have achieved the thing they’re trying to achieve. And then when you know that by listening and asking questions now, that’s when you start leveraging whatever it is, you know, the people, you know, the skills, you know, the systems and techniques. Then you bring that to bear on helping them achieve whatever it is that they need to achieve.

Speaker 0 | 36:50.801
I love how you put that. I mean, so a really interesting kind of concept of since we’re doing a podcast here, right? I was. continuing conversation and keeping conversation going, which is a big deal with podcasts. You have to keep, you know, you have to keep doing that. Otherwise, there’s dead air, right? So you got to keep the conversation going. And one of the ways that, one of the best ways to do that is to ask questions, right? And some of the most natural questions come from when you try to take yourself and put yourself into, you know, empathize really with what’s going on and try to put yourself and understand what’s happening in, you know, in the whatever is described. That’s when the most natural questions come because you’re like, OK, well, if I’m going to put myself here now, I have questions. Right. You know, wait a second. Why was it this way? How is this happening? All the you know, all these different pieces appear. So I love how you connected that because it’s just so relevant. If you want to get the best questions to fully understand a problem, right, taking yourself and putting it in and caring about it, right, by inserting yourself in there and going, OK, let’s let’s try to figure out, you know, what’s going on and really invest myself into this conversation is a huge deal. So, yeah, I I can see that. I appreciate that. going into explain that. So if we bring that back, you know, the question that was posed is, you know, how do you figure out the audience and the best way that they’re going to respond to your teaching method? And your answer essentially was you have to understand your audience. You have to care about your audience, right?

Speaker 1 | 38:45.006
Effort, right? That’s how you do effort. There isn’t It isn’t like there isn’t a trick. There isn’t a I mean, there are there’s a million. There’s none. And yet it’s infinite. Right. It just comes down to you have to decide you care about that and then you have to do it. Right. Like there’s because there’s all different people, you know, some people it’s you have to. to understand somebody’s motivation and interests and where they’re coming from. You know, sometimes you’ve just got to chit chat with people. Sometimes you’ve got to really dive deep and try and figure out, like, why are they being defensive? And, you know, like they might have their shields up. So you’ve got to figure out, OK, well, what are they scared of right now? So you can get that out of the way so that everybody can relax and stop pointing fingers and just start. working right um and sometimes when you do that you might find out that you know like the reason it’s not working is you and so then you’ve got to be willing to go okay well if i care about a good outcome here i need to change something so what can you change and um all of that just takes legitimate work. And, and for anybody listening, that’s, you know, like moving up into leadership or you’re in a leadership role and it’s not going well. That’s, that’s the answer is there is no easy answer. It’s work. You have to decide you care about it and you have to work, you know, you’ve just got to do the reps of how can I get better? Get, how can I get feedback on what is challenging to, you know, like if you’re somebody who. If you’re somebody who finds yourself regularly frustrated by inability to influence a situation, you got to think about it, right? Like, how is it happening? When are people shutting down? What are the roadblocks I’m having? And then you’ve got to go figure out what exercises you need to do to fix it and then do the reps, you know? And,

Speaker 0 | 40:59.087
you know, on that note, you had posted something on LinkedIn. And I think it’s kind of relevant, right? Because that… uh, that introspection, right. And, and kind of going, going through that stuff will naturally bring up a, uh, a, uh, feelings of, oh, how did I do that? I can’t believe I did that. Right. Because as you learn and get better, you look back at what you did and you’re like, why was it, why would I even do that thing? Right. And you regret things. Right. And, uh, um, uh, one of the quotes that I saw you, you post on there was indulge in regret.

Speaker 1 | 41:35.302
in moderation once the lesson is learned it’s a waste yeah so you know basically to continue and also i think it’s important that you should have regrets because if you have regrets that means you’ve gotten better if you don’t have any regrets that means you’re probably not any better than you were when you did the stupid thing that you should regret so it’s great i have so many regrets i’m getting so much so much better amazing the trick is to not regret the same thing over and over.

Speaker 0 | 42:07.602
Yes, I agree with that.

Speaker 1 | 42:09.183
Yeah. Actually, I think it’s pretty fun to look back and think of the thing you did that was really dumb and then realize like, I’m actually better now, right? Like the fact that I even recognize that that was dumb, it was dumb in this way, it demonstrates your own growth. So

Speaker 0 | 42:28.168
I agree with you on that. So let’s talk about let’s talk about so i’m gonna go back for a minute because we glanced over microsoft right and we joked about them we we said good things about them then we joked about them but uh microsoft is like a behemoth and they just keep growing and doing some crazy things uh fantastic things um you know uh there’s so much to talk about about microsoft yeah um and and how they’ve just developed their stack uh you And you said you earlier on said you you one of the companies you’d want to work with. Right. To you know, if you’re given the chance. Tell me about why you what your opinion of Microsoft is and and the current landscape of things and how well they’ve done and. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 43:24.127
So my opinion of them, it’s in the context of having having an opinion. a long time ago, right? So when I started out in IT, I suppose that was like Windows NT days, like the very latter part of that. And one of the things was like, if you didn’t work at Microsoft, it was just a black box. Like if you wanted to learn how they did something or why they did something, well, you got white papers and articles on CDs that they would mail out. And like, that was kind of it. And you didn’t know why they were doing things, when they were doing things. And you really, it was just this big monolith that did all sorts of stuff. And it, you know, it would just steamroll anything. And the reason I’m so impressed with them and so interested in how they operate internally is the conceptual shift they’ve gone through from having black box. proprietary systems to trying to centralize and open up everything and have a like somebody at microsoft has a vision of applications and infrastructure as code that they have consistently pushed things to go from a bunch of different unconnected or if the applications and systems were connected they were connected through proprietary connectors that were you also black boxes. And if you look at where it’s gone from there to the current day, It’s like they’re now releasing tools that do things like interact with ERP systems, databases, cloud things. And they’re building tools using the same tools that I can use with the Power Platform, with the Dataverse, with Power BI and PowerShell and different things. And it’s like watching. the effectiveness of how that attitude over, I don’t even know, I say five years, but I’m getting so old now, it’s probably more like 10. Watching how it used to be so hard to build or change anything at Microsoft, seeing that as a customer in this very slow pace of change, to now where it is overwhelming how much change. and growth in their product line happens. And you can go mess with it. Like they have things now where they’ll release a paid tool and you can go riff off of their solution and add things to it and change it and see exactly how it works. And so I guess that’s why it’s so fascinating to me is I’ve seen the massive company go from the monolith to really embracing. iteration and agility and a spirit that is encouraging change where a lot of large companies, they stagnate and they die when they’re at a place of achievement. And at least in, you know, Microsoft’s obviously a huge megacorp, so you can’t make a blanket statement about anything, but there’s a part of it that I interact with that’s so different from what it used to be. And I’m just fascinated by… how they’re, I want to know how they’re leading their team, how they’re encouraging people, how they deal with all of the challenges and problems that are real, that are side effects of that kind of innovative mindset. And yet they’ve got an ecosystem that’s bigger than it’s ever been more complicated than it’s ever been, and yet more integrated than I think anybody ever even thought possible.

Speaker 0 | 47:29.710
Yeah, it’s, it’s an amazing viewpoint on Microsoft and a good one too. I mean, it. you know, companies can get large and they can get big and stagnant and stuff. You’re right. Microsoft is right now, it’s really dynamic. I mean, it might not stay that way, but right now it’s really dynamic. There’s so many different pieces and ways in which you can implement it in all sorts of different fashions, right? I mean, companies can have a… many different ways that they implement Microsoft, starting off the most basic just for the collaboration suite and then moving into, like you mentioned, the power stuff, dynamics, going into all the different facets of things. They want to take their infrastructure and pop it up into the cloud and Azure. It’s amazing the amount of complexity. But the amount of dynamicness that it allows for. But it kind of reminds me of, you know, Microsoft has always had to deal with that, right? Because if you look at the Apple and the very, hey, we’re going to keep it one way. We’re going to have standardizations. Always going to be this. We’re going to control the hardware. And then in the PC world, which was run by Microsoft’s operating system mostly, right? um uh it’s a wild wild west it’s like hey you can do anything you want and we’ll just we’ll try to put a piece it all together and make it work right and somehow they did um and uh i mean obviously you know there’s issues and problems and stuff like that but they fix them and they move on um and uh um the the amount of successful uh implementations far outweighs the uh um the unsuccessful ones interesting take on microsoft and evolving and i also think it’s you

Speaker 1 | 49:28.582
I feel like they are, but there’s, it’s so close and it’s, maybe it’s not even close. Maybe it’s already here. The fact that their ecosystem is so broad and you can mess with it, you’re starting to be able to do some wild stuff as a, without a lot of resources, like because you, they’ve, they’ve exposed. your communication systems, your ERP systems, your infrastructure systems. and AI systems now, and like an individual now can go into that ecosystem. You can just do like really cool stuff. And it’s like, it’s so neat. Like the, the potential that is the result of this very, it has to be grueling. Like I said, I. I don’t know their leadership stack. I don’t know who’s been driving it. But somebody has spent a decade driving a concept that is now turning into this thing that’s just so incredible and how much it can empower an organization to just do insane things that never would have been possible. And now you can do them almost trivially. as far as being able to integrate things, automate things, tie systems together. That’s pretty neat.

Speaker 0 | 51:05.608
I agree. And now they’re throwing AI into the mix and shaking everything up. And that’s a whole other topic. But it actually is a good segue, because we’re going to go into our final segment, which is the IT crystal ball. People know this is the future of IT, and we like to think about IT out next five years. What’s coming up? What are we going to see? A lot of times, AI kind of jumped into the mix here. But since AI is here, it’s not even the future anymore. And, you know, the future is going to be how… how a lot of this technology shakes out and kind of moves forward. And then, you know, what does that do? And I think in this case, I’m going to kind of pose these questions to you. You know, what is the future of IT when it comes to learning, problem solving, right? Leadership, you know, where… Where is that going to go? I think I’m going to kind of, that’s the question I’m going to pose to you and hand over to you to see. Because I know that these are things that you are already churning in your brain for the now. And I know that you’ve already kind of thought about what the future of these things are going to hold.

Speaker 1 | 52:48.276
So I think it’s not unique to IT. When I say like, we’re already there’s a, you know, a lot of automation technologies hit the blue collar workforce in previous decades. And now you’re seeing automation technologies hit the white collar workforce. And, you know, like you said, AI is not the future anymore. It’s a reality. And the reality of it is. It’s a force multiplier, right? Just like all these other automation technologies, the ability to integrate easier, it’s a force multiplier. So the future of IT and leadership, I think is the same as the future of business systems in general, is you’re going to see a continued consolidation of leadership positions insofar as you don’t have to be a technologist to do technology things anymore. And you don’t have to be a finance person to do finance things anymore. You don’t have to be in anything to do anything anymore. And it’s real now, but it’s going to be normalized as people come into the workforce who started, like, you know, they were brought up. With the idea that, yeah, you can learn anything, you can figure anything out, you can build anything because you can just go, you can ask an AI how to do it. And then you have the tools to do like low code, no code integrations and development. And when you put those two things together, you’re going to see that the reinforcement of value for people who are walking into a… leadership situation that are open, creative, intelligent, and just willing to take a swing at it. And the flip side of that is you’re going to see a lot of disruption for people who were very effective when they could be. moderate experts in a narrow domain and there’s not gonna their value is really going to decrease over time and that’s going to be very disruptive so some flexibility adaptability those are going to be um the keys yeah because i think the era like the need for specialization will decrease and so you know you Why can’t any random person go do a project on any random thing? As long as you’re able and willing to learn fast, you can ask questions, understands people’s needs, be creative. It doesn’t matter what you went to school for. I think it’s just going to be the idea of the knowledge. This sounds very pretentious. Knowledge worker 2.0. Don’t quote me on that because if I ever hear it anywhere else, I’m going to vomit. But it is the idea that what we used to call a knowledge worker, these tools that are coming now, like that person is going to be able to do just crazy things. And you’re going to need less people to fill a team for that person to go do cool stuff that really helps a business.

Speaker 0 | 56:31.958
So what you also see is a more collaborative future.

Speaker 1 | 56:36.859
Yeah, absolutely. But one where there’s fewer staff members, you know, like there’s going to be fewer jobs in middle management. There’s going to be fewer jobs where you’re an OK software developer. There’s going to be fewer jobs where you’re an OK help desk technician. Because if you’re a help desk tech, you’re a developer, it doesn’t matter what you know. What matters is, are you good with people? Can you figure out what their needs are? Because if you can do that, the technical stuff, the value of it is really decreasing. Nobody cares. Nobody cares because it’s all going to be, you’re going to have brilliant people and everything in chat GPT. co-pilot god help us or whatever you know whatever it is that’s where the knowledge is and it’s the people skills the interaction the attitude and the raw intelligence of somebody who can just put all those pieces together um

Speaker 0 | 57:45.167
that’s going to be we always tell people and it always pops up on this podcast which is um it’s all skills right which is oh you know because we do a lot with leadership and dealing with leadership and dealing with executive leadership. And soft skills are huge in that regard. And it seems to me, the same kind of concept, those soft skills are going to be more relevant than ever.

Speaker 1 | 58:13.861
Yeah. The challenge, of course, if you’re a business trying to build a team, it’s going to be interesting. It’ll be interesting in the crystal ball. What the intersection is between the capability of AI and automation tools to just do the work that the mid-level mediocre folks used to do versus the ability to find and hire the people who are able to like marshal the vast technology capacity of the future to go do that stuff. Because, you know, we. Like you said, we say soft skills are important, but the reality of it is they’re rare people. It is not common to be able to find people who are bright, great at engaging other folks, understand enough about business and everything that’s going on to be able to facilitate, you know, building things like that. Um, so it’s kind of hard, like, how do you send somebody to college and say, oh, I want a degree in being a badass. Like, but those people are. Like they’re going to be able to do so much because they won’t be, uh, they’re not going to have to be good at leading a team of people to go build stuff. You know, you’re just going to be able to put together a little strike group of really good people and turn them loose. And it’s going to be amazing. It already is, but it’s going to be even more amazing. So yeah, it’ll be interesting times.

Speaker 0 | 59:44.599
Interesting. That’ll be the, uh, um, the mark of, uh, of the companies that will actually, uh, make it through the. AI revolution, right? The ones that can be adaptable, the ones that can find good team, can find and build good teams and keep them. Right. So these are all relevant things now. They’re the same kind of concept. It seems like it continues the same concept. It just keeps honing in on the specifics.

Speaker 1 | 60:17.752
It’s not. It’s just an amplifier, right? All the things that have already been there, it just makes it bigger and bigger and bigger. And that means if you… aren’t able to do those, you get a smaller and smaller and smaller piece of what’s left over. So yeah.

Speaker 0 | 60:37.548
Couldn’t have said it better. Nerds, I’m Michael Moore, and I’ve been hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And I’ve been here with Mark Ellestad, Director of IT and Digital Transformation at Moses Lake Industries and co-founder of Better Tools, LLC. Mark, thank you so much for coming on the program and offering your insight.

Speaker 1 | 60:57.144
Likewise. Really enjoyed my time. Thanks.

Speaker 0 | 60:59.210
Thanks.