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372- Reverse Mentorship Leadership w/Larry Monuteaux

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Dissecting Popular IT Nerds
Dissecting Popular IT Nerds
372- Reverse Mentorship Leadership w/Larry Monuteaux
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ON THIS EPISODE


➤ How to learn leadership from bad boss experiences
➤ The servant leadership framework that actually delivers business results
➤ Simple technique for eliminating cultural barriers in global team meetings
➤ Individual management assessment strategies for different personality types
➤ Building IT reputation through equal service excellence across all organizational levels


What happens when an English major accidentally becomes an IT VP through reverse mentorship?
At a Boston-area property management company, Larry Monuteaux leads IT initiatives spanning everything from end-user support to building management systems and tenant amenities. With 30 years of accidental IT experience starting from data entry and backup tape swapping, Larry shares how 15 years of terrible bosses became his leadership education.


From managing global teams across multiple time zones to developing individual management approaches for different personality types, Larry discusses the servant leadership philosophy that focuses on team happiness to deliver superior organizational results.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of their employers, affiliates, organizations, or any other entities. The content provided is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. The podcast hosts and producers are not responsible for any actions taken based on the discussions in the episodes. We encourage listeners to consult with a professional or conduct their own research before making any decisions based on the content of this podcast

3 Key Takeaways

  • Learning from negative management examples can be more powerful than traditional mentorship
  • Real-time shared note-taking eliminates cultural barriers in global team meetings
  • Focusing on team happiness delivers better business results than command-and-control leadership

Episode Show Notes

00:30 – Introduction and property management IT overview

02:15 – Career journey from English major to accidental IT entry

07:45 – Learning leadership through 15 years of bad boss examples

12:20 – The servant leadership discovery and team happiness focus

18:30 – Global team communication breakthrough technique

24:15 – Individual management assessment strategies

31:45 – Building IT reputation through equal service excellence

38:20 – Stoicism practice and modern leadership principles

42:10 – Career advice for IT professionals without formal leadership training

Transcript

Host: Mike Kelley

Guest: Larry Monuteaux

Mike Kelley: Everybody, welcome back to another episode of Dissecting Popularity Nerds. Today we got Larry Monuteaux. And Larry is a fellow VP of Information Technology. Hey, Larry, why don’t you tell us a little about yourself, sir?

Larry Monuteaux: Hi, Mike. Glad to be here. I am an IT leader in the Boston area. I currently have a small team, working at a property management company. We handle everything from end-user support all the way to network design for both our building management systems and building security, as well as tenant amenities like fitness centers and conference rooms, and a lot of AV and things like that.

Mike Kelley: So how long have you been doing that with the property company? And tell me a little more about some of your your background. Where’d you get the spark in IT?

Larry Monuteaux: I originally wasn’t going to be an IT person. My goal in life was to be a teacher. I was an English major in school, and I was into reading and writing about literature and poetry. And I really wanted to be a teacher. I got trained for and got certified to teach high school. This was in the mid-nineties, so thirty years ago. And back then, there were no jobs for teachers. Today, I think there’s a shortage of teachers.

Mike Kelley: And a shortage of pay for teachers too.

Larry Monuteaux: But a lot of people I knew were trying to be subs in different school systems and then hope somebody retires or some opening happens and they have a little bit of experience so maybe some of the people know them. So I didn’t really like that idea of just having nothing steady and hoping I get a phone call that morning to come in the last minute because some teacher called in sick. So I just got a job and it happened to be in an IT department, and I was just doing data entry and swapping out backup tapes and running reports and things like that. Just low-level stuff.

Mike Kelley: And this is still in the nineties, so it’s still…

Larry Monuteaux: This is ninety-five. So Windows 3.1.1. And so there’s some color, but it’s still a lot of DOS. We were writing reports in Paradox. They had a call center at this place that I was at, so they had a Unix system that ran their call center, and I didn’t know what I was doing, so I just swapped the backup tapes, and I ran commands that they told me to run. I didn’t know anything back then. But I started to pick it up and started to learn more and started to eventually help people at the company with installing things or basically starting to do support. It was a small company. They didn’t really have a support function; just the programmers and things used to help people.

Mike Kelley: That’s why I started laughing when I heard that you wanted to be a teacher first because that’s all I do inside of IT is teach people. So keep going.

Larry Monuteaux: And so eventually it came full circle in a way. I really like doing the support. There’s a teaching component to that if you want there to be. So I said I’d like to do this as my job. And I left there and I started doing support full-time. And it was great. I was learning a ton. I started learning about networking a little bit. I was publishing apps a lot because I had a lot of remote people or distributed people. They were around the country and they needed to use an app that really needed to be written next to a SQL server. So you publish that out and they can use it from anywhere. I did that for quite a while. People started to tell me that they wished that I was the manager, and I resisted that for a long time.

Mike Kelley: Your coworkers or the people throughout the organization?

Larry Monuteaux: Coworkers, mostly. People that were like, I would be a sysadmin and somebody from the help desk would need me to do something with them. They would escalate something to me, and I’d work with them, and I would kind of teach them what we were doing and how I went about troubleshooting. And then they’d say, “Man, I wish you were my boss.” And it was nice to hear that. But I had had bosses in the past that regretted me going into leadership because they felt like it got too far away from the technology. And so I didn’t want to pursue that path because I didn’t want that to happen to me. So I did the sysadmin system engineering for a long time. And in 2015, I took a leadership role, and that’s when I think it came full circle. I became a leader and a mentor to a team, and I could take them under my wing, and I could lend my experience to them and be the boss that I had wished that I had in my years coming up. And I definitely found that I wanted to be a servant leader type person, and that’s what I believe today. I focus and I tell my team, I focus on you guys, and I want you to be happy, and I want to give you what you need to be happy and successful, and get people off your back if you’re being pressured. And I think that the organization benefits more from taking that attitude than if I was a company man saying, crack the whip or do this or that. And they do. They’re happier. They’re doing better work. They’re more enthused about what they’re doing. And the organization benefits. They give better service. I don’t feel embarrassed or ashamed about that at all.

Mike Kelley: I’m curious, who modeled that for you? Who mentored you in a way that you knew that’s how to lead, or was it so many examples of not to do it that you went the other direction because that’s what you wanted?

Larry Monuteaux: I think it’s the latter. I had a lot of bosses and managers, directors that I thought, “I would never do that that way.” And I found myself saying that a lot more. And that’s when I thought maybe it was time for me to take on a role and see how I would perform and how I would do that. I don’t really feel like I had a mentor coming up or in my early career. So I want to be that for other people because I know what it’s like to not have that.

Mike Kelley: Working with networking at that time and starting at that period that you did, there weren’t that many trailblazers before us. I really started in my career in 2001. Prior to that, I was bartending. So I brought a customer service aspect to the way that I approach things. But there just wasn’t anybody that we could look to, to follow. Any of the mentors we looked to were way off over in the distance and had done some amazing things, and we were just left with, “Alright, figure it out,” or “Here’s the manual.”

Larry Monuteaux: Today people major in IT. That wasn’t a thing back then.

Mike Kelley: No, no certifications and stuff, instead. For me, I blended. I was doing well in the computer classes and doing well in business classes and because of the bartending was understanding of business. So I had a teacher that said, “Hey, why don’t you combine those two?” That’s a good idea. So I was like, okay, that works. As I did the cyberstalking on you, you mentioned some about working with global teams. Tell me what was one of the surprising things of working with global teams?

Larry Monuteaux: I found that there was a language barrier where I was assured that there wouldn’t be. I remember a weekly meeting I used to run for folks in the US and in India. The Indian guys would not have any questions, but I came to find out later that they didn’t get what the US guy was saying. And that was a challenge because I didn’t know how to handle it. I would say, “Do you have any questions? Are you sure you get this? Because this is the time to ask these questions. This is where we’re hashing this out. This is the meeting for that. If we don’t answer this today, we’re not going to meet again for another week, so we might not get anything done this coming week.” It’s a cultural barrier to questioning people. There’s a lot of deferential treatment. I would say, “We’re all on the same team. We’re all working together,” but none of what I would say mattered. So what I ended up doing was I was also the note-taker for the meeting. I would take the notes live in a shared screen and I would email these out to everybody that attended. I was composing the email as we went and everybody could read what I was typing, what was happening. And I was typing it in real-time. This is also good for the speaker, saying, “Am I getting that right?” And they could read it too. Because the folks on the call could read the bullets on the screen, there was a little time to really process that. And then all of a sudden more key questions were being asked and things were getting hashed out and problems were getting solved much better. And it was just a little thing. Just taking the notes. I was going to do it anyway. It didn’t slow the meeting down. We were still having the meeting. I needed to take the notes anyway. Just sharing my screen didn’t take any extra time, and it made all the difference in the world.

Mike Kelley: It helped bring the team together and got through that cultural barrier. So what are most of your experiences, working with a single country, or was it multiple countries, multiple cultures?

Larry Monuteaux: I would say about half and half, roughly. I’ve done a lot with remote teams since about 2015. Now I’m in a US-based company. Back then, I did a lot more of that. A couple of years ago, right before COVID, I was in a role where I had a team with a couple of people in Shanghai, a couple of people in Pune, and a couple of guys in Europe. My days were meeting-heavy at the beginning and they’d start early. I usually did about half a day at home. I would start my day at five or five-thirty, because it’s already 6 p.m. in Shanghai, so people are already staying late just to meet with me. Then I would head into the office midday and work the remainder of the day on my other stuff.

Mike Kelley: Any other cultural lessons with that group? I have to admit, I’m amazed that you were able to take notes while somebody else was talking because I am horrible at that. I’m staring at the keyboard.

Larry Monuteaux: I don’t know how good I am at it. And everybody had to suffer, maybe watching me peck my way through it. But one of the things I learned in that role and in other roles is that you have to think about each individual person that reports to you and what they might need. Somebody might be like, “I can give you a project.” And I say, “Listen, check in with me when you need to. Let me know how it goes. If you need me for anything.” And then another person I might need to help work with them step-by-step because they’re newer or they are shy or whatever the case may be. Some people need more face time and some people just do their own thing and they don’t want to be bothered. Somebody needs reassurance that they’re doing a good job. Somebody else wants me to be more understanding if they need to have unexpected time off or something. Everybody’s different. And so my job is to figure out what they need to make them happy and successful in their role and to appreciate them personally.

Mike Kelley: As I too have tried to have that servant leader mentality with my teams and my coworkers, I wonder, how was it the first time you had to let somebody go? When you faced that those first few times, how much of a struggle was it? Because I know I struggled with that one.

Larry Monuteaux: That’s awful. I’m not that great at that. I’m more of a carrot person than a stick person, so it’s hard for me to call attention to deficiencies. But that’s necessary too because people learn from that. They’re learning from their mistakes. I’ve had to do that where I had to document issues, and it’s just awful because I try to do everything I can before I have to resort to that, because I want to give them every opportunity to try to improve. And I want to be there for them if they need me. But I’ve had to do that, and there’s no getting around that conversation when you have to have it.

Mike Kelley: It’s a difficult conversation. But one of the things that I found over time, those first few of them were a real struggle for me. But then I’ve also found that there are a lot of times where that time of honesty and that honest appraisal and just being straightforward with them as they’re struggling and acknowledging those struggles gives them that chance to improve those areas. But then, unfortunately, I’ve had some of those coworkers who just acknowledged them and didn’t do anything to change it or continued to do other things that just kept making it worse. And so, like we both said, it’s never fun. But I also found that after I struggled so hard trying to give somebody that carrot so often, that there were times where I hurt them by maintaining it for longer.

Larry Monuteaux: I find that dangerous as well. Being genuine and having time and connecting on a personal level, when the tough conversations have to happen, I think they’re easier because I haven’t been bullshitting them all this time. They can trust me. And I tell them, sometimes I share if I’m frustrated about something else, or I talk to them in confidence about what I think about something at the organization. I’m hoping that I build that rapport so that if they’re having a struggle, maybe they approach me about it. Or if they don’t, when I have to approach them about something, the conversation goes a little smoother, hopefully.

Mike Kelley: For sure. So what are some of the surprising things that you’ve run into in your career? What’s one of the life lessons that you never expected going from being a teacher to doing technology and to leading groups?

Larry Monuteaux: I don’t know if I’m surprised by a lot of things anymore. I think I’m continually low-level surprised by the politics that happens. I know how to recognize that when it happens, and I know how to protect myself, but it’s surprising. I just want to get stuff done. I just want to bring technology solutions to the organization. I don’t want to step on anybody. And it’s surprising to me how many people are focused on that. I just don’t understand what you get out of doing that. I guess I’m continually surprised by that.

Mike Kelley: Along those lines then, how do we help the people that are listening to us, that are struggling with some of that and have no idea how to either separate themselves from it? Because that’s one of the defenses I use, is to separate myself from it and not participate in it, and to focus in on accomplishing the things that I say that I’m going to do or that the team has promised to do. What thoughts do you have around that? What lessons can you help share?

Larry Monuteaux: As part of mentoring, especially for younger people, a lot of that is to help them figure out how to recognize that when it’s happening so that they know enough to take the steps to separate themselves from it, to avoid getting into those conversations and to show them the pitfalls that may be happening, to use examples about other things that happened among other people, because it might not be apparent. Looking back, I can see things that happened at the various companies I’ve been at that I didn’t know at the time. I couldn’t see it because I was too green. I don’t know if I would be a good fit for somebody on my team that was looking to climb the ladder at somebody else’s expense. A lot of times because we are in that support role, I’d hope that we’d want to be on the side of a lot of that stuff.

Mike Kelley: As I look through some of these things, I noticed you prefer a well-thought-out, well-designed approach. What lessons taught you that? Because I’m guessing that with no mentor in the beginning and nobody to really show you the ropes, that’s something that you learn with experience. Is that spending more time planning it out exactly how to implement something is worth a lot more than just going after it? Because there are so many times we as IT were just like, “Hey, I need this,” and we go running off after it.

Larry Monuteaux: I’ve seen the negative results of that so much, especially in smaller orgs where they either don’t have enough of an IT group or don’t have any IT group. I think the ideal position to go into is a company that’s kind of exiting out of that informal phase of its life and it wants to put some policies in place and procedures in place and standards. And I love transforming an org from that to something that has something scalable, repeatable, recorded, logged. It’s because I’ve seen it so many times, “Let’s just get it done.” I’m like, “I know, but we can take just a few minutes more and make a procedure that we can repeat going forward.” And if we do it a certain way, we can do it again and again. We will regret it if we don’t. And it just takes a minute more. A lot of times people are reluctant to do that or they resist it because they either feel like they are going to lose their unique role, maybe if we automate something for example, or they like the fact that they’re the holder of the tribal knowledge. And that’s a touchy situation sometimes. So it requires sometimes you have to bear witness to folks when they tell you all the work that they’ve been doing all this time and how nobody appreciates it. And that’s true. They did all that work and nobody appreciated them. And let’s work together to try to put this system in place to automate that. And we’re going to use your knowledge about the way things worked to design this system because you’re the only one that really knows how all the pieces fit together. My hope is that people are put at ease by that. I certainly need them because I don’t know how it worked. That’s part of project planning, to figure out how it’s worked up till now.

Mike Kelley: What manual processes, for example, do we have to account for? The discovery process of the tribal knowledge. Especially if that tribal knowledge holder is either gone or doesn’t want to share. That’s a huge challenge. And right back into the politics. Although a different branch than the people who are using other bodies to climb.

Larry Monuteaux: This is the, “It’s mine.” There’s a customer service part to that too. It’s the same thing when somebody is super frustrated because of an issue. I like that because not that they’re frustrated, but I like that challenge. I’m going to go and help them and I’m going to listen to them, and I’m going to appreciate the frustration and express to them that it shouldn’t be working this way. And if I can end my interaction with them where they’re happy and feel appreciated for the work that they do. There are too many IT people that perpetuate that opinion about how IT is not your friend. And I want everybody to think that IT is their friend. At every organization I’ve been in, I’ve said to my manager, “You can ask anybody in the company about me anytime, and they will give you a good review, because I treat them all very well and I give them great service.” I don’t want special treatment. I want you to treat me like you treat everybody else.

Mike Kelley: Treating everybody like you’re talking about helps everybody to feel better about IT. But it also makes it where they find you. “Hey, come help me with this. Hey, come help me with that.”

Larry Monuteaux: That’s why I joke to people. Sometimes they are chasing you down, but also sometimes people don’t want to call because they don’t want to bother you. And I’m like, “That’s the whole reason I’m here.” So I make the joke. They say, “Oh, I’m sorry to bother you.” I’m like, “It keeps me from wandering the streets and getting in trouble. I’m glad you called. Keeps me from shopping on Prime Day.” No, but the org presumably has a mission and everybody in that org is working toward that mission. They all have a piece and they all have a part to play, and they all need technology to do that job. And it’s up to me to give them good solutions and also to fix their problems when they happen.

Mike Kelley: Let’s change tack a little bit. What’s the biggest success that you had that started as a failure?

Larry Monuteaux: I started at this company, and I didn’t really know what was going on. I had only been there a month or so, and I came on to be the Citrix guy because they had a lot of Citrix apps. This company had a ton of apps. This is back in the XP days, so there were a lot more application installs than browser stuff. Anyway, they wanted to build a DMZ for the first time, and this was a financial institution. So they needed secure access to things. They never really had a remote access solution. And this is before everything is in the cloud, so everything’s on-premise. We had a massive data center. To do anything, you needed to be on-site or you needed to be able to get in remotely. And our remote access solution was publishing applications through Citrix. So, I was the Citrix guy, and I had this big Citrix farm, but they wanted to make a DMZ to make that remote access secure. They wanted to bring people in through a load balancer, and they chose the Citrix NetScaler, which is a product that Citrix bought. It’s a reverse proxy and load balancer appliance. And I had never worked with it before. I knew conceptually what a DMZ was, but this project to implement it didn’t have a scope or goals. They had a consultant that I don’t really know if he really understood the NetScaler or how to use it. I was on that project with the head of the network team, who was great on the network side but really didn’t take to the reverse proxy thing. So I thought this project was failing, and I wasn’t really sure what the goals were. I had just started. So I talked to my director about all of that. And he was a guy that you could talk to, so that was nice. And I said, “We really need someone else to come in and help us implement this.” I’m happy to learn everything. I learned the inside and outside of the NetScaler. And we implemented a DMZ, and it became crucial to our remote access solution. It became the way that people connected in remotely when there was a snowstorm or if they were sick. There wasn’t as much working from home back then, but it became a possibility that you could actually do everything that you could do in the office remotely because of all these apps that we published securely. It became the load balancer in front of our secure file transfers with other financial institutions. That stuff gets encrypted and transferred. Anything going in and out of our premise was fed through this device, this proxy. And eventually, it became a big deal in our disaster recovery plan because, again, with everything on-premise, we had a warm site and we were replicating data. And ideally, four times a year we would go over to this hot site on a Saturday and cut the link and see what we could recover from what had been replicated. We had an associated appliance at the hot site that was handling it, so in a disaster, you would reconnect remotely. But if the main site had been destroyed by a disaster, you didn’t know any better. You might not even know, but you would connect to the disaster recovery site instead. So it was a huge success ultimately. And I never thought it would be any success at all when we started. I never really liked that appliance, but I learned a lot about load balancers and reverse proxies, and it was a great experience, and I’m glad to have worked on it.

Mike Kelley: You said this was back in the XP days. What era? That’s like the early or mid-2000s?

Larry Monuteaux: It was about 2006, I think.

Mike Kelley: And so when I think of DMZ, I’m thinking of a hardened web server that goes out in the DMZ, and then you’ve got the corporate network behind it. For the Citrix environment that you’re talking about, the users would log in to basically a web page and then get access to Citrix and then have access to the internal network?

Larry Monuteaux: We had a Citrix Web Interface server, eventually called StoreFront, in the DMZ. So from the outside, you could only ever get to the DMZ through this device. And then that device in turn had access internally. So you never directly accessed anything internally. Everything was proxied for you, kind of like NAT. When you’re going outbound, you all go out as the same IP address. When you’re coming in, this is a reverse proxy, so everything that’s accessed internally is accessed by the IP of the device, not by the end-user, wherever they may be.

Mike Kelley: Which is pretty early into that capability at that time. So many organizations had to understand and learn and just grab that by the horns back in 2020, but you’re talking thirteen, fourteen years before that.

Larry Monuteaux: I hate to say that it’s maybe easier now, but a lot of things are in the cloud now, so you just need to tell people what the URL is. If you’re an Office 365 shop, you don’t have to bring people in remotely to get their email. They just get their email the same way that they always did. When you have a big data center, and all the shared files and the corporate apps, and especially if you’re a financial institution…

Mike Kelley: They definitely wanted to protect the money, go figure.

Larry Monuteaux: Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to go back to the days of having a big data center. You have to make sure that power is redundant and networking is redundant, and all your appliances, firewalls, and switches are redundant, and cooling, and do you need a generator? Do you have fire suppression? All that stuff that people don’t have to think about anymore. You can start a company today, and you just need an internet pipe. You might not even really need an office, depending on what you’re doing. Everything’s in the cloud.

Mike Kelley: It’s amazing how a small company today can spin up so many things so fast, without even knowing all of the fundamentals that we had to learn and understand to be able to build the infrastructures that we did back then.

Larry Monuteaux: On the one hand, the people that really need to know that stuff now are the people that work at AWS or Azure or hosting that stuff or colo places. But on the other hand, it’s a very risky time right now where people are deploying things and those systems are talking to other systems, either other parts of AWS or across clouds to Google or Azure or whatever. And they don’t really know as much about the way that communication ought to happen to secure it properly. And I think that that’s a risky thing, and you see sometimes that that gets exploited. But I’m afraid that there’s a lot more out there that’s insecure. It was easier in the old days, in a way, because you had one way in, and your firewall was this big, important thing. Now I like zero trust where no host trusts any other hosts, and that’s nice, but it takes a lot to get there, especially if you’re having different systems talking to each other across different networks, across different clouds. What traffic is that? What are you opening to?

Mike Kelley: That architecture needs to be as well thought out as an on-prem architecture, even more well-thought-out, I think. Because once you’re inside the walls, it’s easier to take for granted that the level of communication between systems inside of a physical, constrained building is one thing. But when it’s a physical, constrained building with all kinds of different tenants and different companies and multiple people using the exact same hardware, there are ways that it’s not as secure as it used to be because of the fundamental separation.

Larry Monuteaux: Part of what you’re paying for when you subscribe to a SaaS is not having to think about that. But just because you’re not thinking about it and you’re paying for it doesn’t mean it’s being done.

Mike Kelley: That’s right. Exactly. That’s the danger. It’s the things that we need to learn today to make sure that we can vet, to keep our organization safe. Throughout your career, what’s a legacy system or some kind of system technology that you saw get retired, that you think was retired too soon?

Larry Monuteaux: Is there anything out there like that? I don’t know if I thought it was retired too soon, but it was bittersweet to see both NetWare go and Citrix. Citrix is still around. I remember being a big network person and learning NetWare from three, NetWare four, NetWare five, and comparing it to the flat NT 4.0 domain and how it was a nice, LDAP-compliant hierarchy with a tree, and it seemed elegant to me. Little did I know, Group Policy didn’t exist back then, but Active Directory came out and I’m like, “Oh, they’re just trying to copy Novell.” And then it became clear that not only are they going to compete well, but they’re going to win. I had to do some kind of a shell game to get my company switched over to Active Directory. But then I learned about Group Policy, and I loved Group Policy back in the day. I still don’t think you can do everything today, or at least in 2025, with just Intune policies and things that you can with the old Group Policy. Now, obviously, that was designed for an on-prem user base. But I was sad to see Novell go because that was a big deal for me. That was the first thing I felt like I was an expert in in my career. I like it when if I have to call tech support, they immediately escalate me, because if I’m calling, it’s not the level one or level two issue. The same thing with Citrix. Citrix is still out there, but there are a lot fewer things that you have to publish today. Mostly, most new development is web-based. Building PCs is a lot easier today. With Intune deployment, it’s even easier. You install the operating system, you get Office and Adobe on it, and you’re done, because mostly people are living in their browser all day. They might have thirty tabs open, but they used to have thirty applications running. Migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 was a massive project for us because we had to find out of the hundreds and hundreds of applications that we had in the organization, how many were compatible with Windows 7 and how many did we have to figure out some other solution for. Those days are gone now, but I loved my Citrix farm, and I had it tuned just perfectly. People were load-balanced among the server farm and some people didn’t really notice that they were running an application remotely. They thought it might have been installed. Citrix was maybe the biggest example of something that I didn’t know anything about. I went to a class at this company because I was going to be the backup Citrix guy. I went to the class and it was a terrible class. It was a week-long class and I came back and they’re like, “Well, what do you think?” I’m like, “I don’t know. The guy wasn’t really that great. I know enough to be the backup. I’ll pick it up.” They’re like, “Well, you’re going to need to do more than that because Brian just gave his notice and you’re the primary guy.” I’m like, “Well, alright.” So I took another class with a great instructor, and that started me off. I started off in Citrix MetaFrame 1.8 and that was on NT 4.0. And I did Citrix upgrades all the way up to XenApp. The consultant that we had that did the NetScaler asked me if I wanted to go and work for him because he did Citrix, NetScaler, and XenApp and all that stuff. And that was a lot of fun to do that. The virtualization on that side of it was really fun. And then virtual desktop was even better in a way, with VMware View, and then it became Horizon. But I don’t see a lot of Citrix XenApp around as much anymore, except if it’s a specialty app that hasn’t been converted to a web version of it yet.

Mike Kelley: Okay.

Larry Monuteaux: We have an app that we use on the accounting side that’s web-based, but then there are a couple of functions that aren’t in there yet. So they run a Citrix client and connect to it and run basically the Windows version of that app on-premise at the company we buy it from. And eventually, I think that’ll go away too because they’ll build that functionality. It’s on their development pipeline, I’m sure, and they’ll bring it into the web interface and then they won’t need that anymore. And that’s sad and bittersweet. Citrix used to have its own conference, and that was a big deal.

Mike Kelley: So with you doing that at that time, you were on the leading edge of remote utilization, hybrid connectivity, those kinds of things that are commonplace today. It makes me wonder what leading-edge things are you getting to play with today? What’s keeping you interested in IT and keeping you challenged? Because if you were doing that back in 2010, most organizations didn’t start doing that until 2015 or later.

Larry Monuteaux: Right now we’re looking at… well, property management and financial services, which is basically the parent of property management because these are all assets, are very change-averse, and they’re slower in updating. And it’s not just us, it’s all property management companies. So the exciting thing now is that we’re looking at what we can do with all of the data that we get in a building. So you have an office building and there’s a lot of data generated in that building about occupancy, where people are and what floors they’re on, and which ones are vacant and which ones aren’t, and what hours people work. And that data can ultimately inform heating and cooling to be more sustainable, to be more energy-efficient. In an office building, there are hundreds and hundreds of pieces of equipment that keep the building running—chillers and air handlers and filters—hundreds of these devices and those all need to be managed and maintained, and preventative maintenance is done on all of them on widely varying schedules. A complex machine might have eight different separately warranted items in it. So how do we pull all that data about all the equipment and its age and the past maintenance that’s been done on it, past repair work that’s been done on it, what’s its expected life, and how much it costs to maintain it, both in terms of regular maintenance as well as repair? And make intelligent decisions about how long we should keep this piece of equipment or projections to budget, say, across your portfolio of properties. You might want a system that could… this is kind of like an AI-driven thing, so you train it and feed it with the data that you collate from all your buildings and say, “Okay, in the next budget year, you should budget X amount because you’re going to probably need to replace this list of equipment in these buildings, or you’re going to spend this much predictably in your repairs.” So you can better plan budget-wise for predictive maintenance, preventative maintenance, and creating budgets around both of those for the next year or five years. That’s kind of interesting because a lot of that stuff is still done on spreadsheets and some of it’s still done on paper. So the challenge is opportunities. Talk about tribal knowledge, we had a building where the people that run it, the engineers that keep the building going, they’re usually a third-party company. They staff the engineering group and there will be a chief that’s an employee of ours, and then his crew is from this company. They had to do a layoff, and the guy that they laid off had been at that building for 26 years. And he was picked to be laid off because he was the newest guy; all the other guys had been there longer. So talk about tribal knowledge. A lot of this stuff is in these guys’ heads. They know that machine, and this one is temperamental. And that stuff is not captured anywhere. So to try to collate that, and that’s just one building, to collate that across a portfolio of buildings over a million square feet or whatever, that’s an interesting thing that we’re starting to think about.

Mike Kelley: And that also, thinking about the buildings and everything else, really makes one of your statements from earlier land: the private rental public network. Having to have all of those and set those up and then also wanting to leverage, I’m sure, economies of scale. So if you’ve got multiple buildings, especially multiple buildings that are within proximity of each other, where you can run fiber in between them or get connectivity between them, you want to leverage that capability.

Larry Monuteaux: That would be ideal. And I’ve had people reach out for me to take surveys on smart buildings and dealing with those kinds of things to do what you’re talking about. But recognizing the fact that many buildings have been there for a while. They’re doing lots of things like putting grass on the roofs of the buildings, and there are competitions to be… there are certifications that a building can get. You can walk into an office building and there’ll be a LEED emblem on the front of the building because that building achieved that certification of being energy efficient.

Mike Kelley: I hadn’t seen those, but I’m out here in the Southwest where we still got lots of room to grow out.

Larry Monuteaux: Companies are struggling with getting people back to the office because I like to work remotely too. But companies, and my company, they want everybody in the office, all their tenants to have all their people in the office because that’s where they get the value out of the office. So then the question is, what sorts of things can we use to attract people to come in? That means putting in the gym or ping pong tables and lounges and roof decks and all that kind of stuff so that people want to be there. It becomes a cool place to be. And all that stuff has technology, whether it’s a TV or Wi-Fi or music.

Mike Kelley: It’s exciting. All kinds of different challenges. Well, Larry, this has been an awesome conversation. I’ve really enjoyed our time. I want to give you a chance to promote anything that you’ve been doing.

Larry Monuteaux: In my spare time, I am a practitioner of Stoicism. I’m a Stoic, and I’m part of a group called Modern Stoics. Modern Stoicism is a little different than regular Stoicism in that there’s not as much of a focus on the gods when you talk about ancient Stoics like Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. It’s more about the ethics of how to live and how to be a good person and how to make your way in the world and achieve what they call a smooth-flowing life, which is sometimes translated as happiness, but it’s really more satisfaction in life. And this group that I’m involved in is called Conversations with Modern Stoicism. They have a monthly Zoom every once a month on a Saturday, and they have a Stoic expert come in and talk about, say, either grief or being fair or journaling, things like that. We have a vibrant WhatsApp community and it’s a lot of fun. And it’s definitely informed my professional life as well. One of the pieces of Stoicism is that you try not to let things that are out of your control bother you. And as an IT leader, that’s crucial. I help to run a book club where we read Stoic texts from either ancient sources or modern sources, and we meet to discuss those books. And it’s great fun.

Mike Kelley: How do people find you if they want to join that or if they want to learn or see about mentoring?

Larry Monuteaux: They can go to modernstoicism.com. And I can send you a link to the Conversations group. We’re actually having a meeting coming up.

Mike Kelley: All right. Awesome. Thank you very much for your time today.

Larry Monuteaux: Thank you. Talking to you, sir.

Mike Kelley: You too. Thanks a lot.

Larry Monuteaux: Thank you. Bye-bye.

372- Reverse Mentorship Leadership w/Larry Monuteaux

Host: Mike Kelley

Guest: Larry Monuteaux

Mike Kelley: Everybody, welcome back to another episode of Dissecting Popularity Nerds. Today we got Larry Monuteaux. And Larry is a fellow VP of Information Technology. Hey, Larry, why don’t you tell us a little about yourself, sir?

Larry Monuteaux: Hi, Mike. Glad to be here. I am an IT leader in the Boston area. I currently have a small team, working at a property management company. We handle everything from end-user support all the way to network design for both our building management systems and building security, as well as tenant amenities like fitness centers and conference rooms, and a lot of AV and things like that.

Mike Kelley: So how long have you been doing that with the property company? And tell me a little more about some of your your background. Where’d you get the spark in IT?

Larry Monuteaux: I originally wasn’t going to be an IT person. My goal in life was to be a teacher. I was an English major in school, and I was into reading and writing about literature and poetry. And I really wanted to be a teacher. I got trained for and got certified to teach high school. This was in the mid-nineties, so thirty years ago. And back then, there were no jobs for teachers. Today, I think there’s a shortage of teachers.

Mike Kelley: And a shortage of pay for teachers too.

Larry Monuteaux: But a lot of people I knew were trying to be subs in different school systems and then hope somebody retires or some opening happens and they have a little bit of experience so maybe some of the people know them. So I didn’t really like that idea of just having nothing steady and hoping I get a phone call that morning to come in the last minute because some teacher called in sick. So I just got a job and it happened to be in an IT department, and I was just doing data entry and swapping out backup tapes and running reports and things like that. Just low-level stuff.

Mike Kelley: And this is still in the nineties, so it’s still…

Larry Monuteaux: This is ninety-five. So Windows 3.1.1. And so there’s some color, but it’s still a lot of DOS. We were writing reports in Paradox. They had a call center at this place that I was at, so they had a Unix system that ran their call center, and I didn’t know what I was doing, so I just swapped the backup tapes, and I ran commands that they told me to run. I didn’t know anything back then. But I started to pick it up and started to learn more and started to eventually help people at the company with installing things or basically starting to do support. It was a small company. They didn’t really have a support function; just the programmers and things used to help people.

Mike Kelley: That’s why I started laughing when I heard that you wanted to be a teacher first because that’s all I do inside of IT is teach people. So keep going.

Larry Monuteaux: And so eventually it came full circle in a way. I really like doing the support. There’s a teaching component to that if you want there to be. So I said I’d like to do this as my job. And I left there and I started doing support full-time. And it was great. I was learning a ton. I started learning about networking a little bit. I was publishing apps a lot because I had a lot of remote people or distributed people. They were around the country and they needed to use an app that really needed to be written next to a SQL server. So you publish that out and they can use it from anywhere. I did that for quite a while. People started to tell me that they wished that I was the manager, and I resisted that for a long time.

Mike Kelley: Your coworkers or the people throughout the organization?

Larry Monuteaux: Coworkers, mostly. People that were like, I would be a sysadmin and somebody from the help desk would need me to do something with them. They would escalate something to me, and I’d work with them, and I would kind of teach them what we were doing and how I went about troubleshooting. And then they’d say, “Man, I wish you were my boss.” And it was nice to hear that. But I had had bosses in the past that regretted me going into leadership because they felt like it got too far away from the technology. And so I didn’t want to pursue that path because I didn’t want that to happen to me. So I did the sysadmin system engineering for a long time. And in 2015, I took a leadership role, and that’s when I think it came full circle. I became a leader and a mentor to a team, and I could take them under my wing, and I could lend my experience to them and be the boss that I had wished that I had in my years coming up. And I definitely found that I wanted to be a servant leader type person, and that’s what I believe today. I focus and I tell my team, I focus on you guys, and I want you to be happy, and I want to give you what you need to be happy and successful, and get people off your back if you’re being pressured. And I think that the organization benefits more from taking that attitude than if I was a company man saying, crack the whip or do this or that. And they do. They’re happier. They’re doing better work. They’re more enthused about what they’re doing. And the organization benefits. They give better service. I don’t feel embarrassed or ashamed about that at all.

Mike Kelley: I’m curious, who modeled that for you? Who mentored you in a way that you knew that’s how to lead, or was it so many examples of not to do it that you went the other direction because that’s what you wanted?

Larry Monuteaux: I think it’s the latter. I had a lot of bosses and managers, directors that I thought, “I would never do that that way.” And I found myself saying that a lot more. And that’s when I thought maybe it was time for me to take on a role and see how I would perform and how I would do that. I don’t really feel like I had a mentor coming up or in my early career. So I want to be that for other people because I know what it’s like to not have that.

Mike Kelley: Working with networking at that time and starting at that period that you did, there weren’t that many trailblazers before us. I really started in my career in 2001. Prior to that, I was bartending. So I brought a customer service aspect to the way that I approach things. But there just wasn’t anybody that we could look to, to follow. Any of the mentors we looked to were way off over in the distance and had done some amazing things, and we were just left with, “Alright, figure it out,” or “Here’s the manual.”

Larry Monuteaux: Today people major in IT. That wasn’t a thing back then.

Mike Kelley: No, no certifications and stuff, instead. For me, I blended. I was doing well in the computer classes and doing well in business classes and because of the bartending was understanding of business. So I had a teacher that said, “Hey, why don’t you combine those two?” That’s a good idea. So I was like, okay, that works. As I did the cyberstalking on you, you mentioned some about working with global teams. Tell me what was one of the surprising things of working with global teams?

Larry Monuteaux: I found that there was a language barrier where I was assured that there wouldn’t be. I remember a weekly meeting I used to run for folks in the US and in India. The Indian guys would not have any questions, but I came to find out later that they didn’t get what the US guy was saying. And that was a challenge because I didn’t know how to handle it. I would say, “Do you have any questions? Are you sure you get this? Because this is the time to ask these questions. This is where we’re hashing this out. This is the meeting for that. If we don’t answer this today, we’re not going to meet again for another week, so we might not get anything done this coming week.” It’s a cultural barrier to questioning people. There’s a lot of deferential treatment. I would say, “We’re all on the same team. We’re all working together,” but none of what I would say mattered. So what I ended up doing was I was also the note-taker for the meeting. I would take the notes live in a shared screen and I would email these out to everybody that attended. I was composing the email as we went and everybody could read what I was typing, what was happening. And I was typing it in real-time. This is also good for the speaker, saying, “Am I getting that right?” And they could read it too. Because the folks on the call could read the bullets on the screen, there was a little time to really process that. And then all of a sudden more key questions were being asked and things were getting hashed out and problems were getting solved much better. And it was just a little thing. Just taking the notes. I was going to do it anyway. It didn’t slow the meeting down. We were still having the meeting. I needed to take the notes anyway. Just sharing my screen didn’t take any extra time, and it made all the difference in the world.

Mike Kelley: It helped bring the team together and got through that cultural barrier. So what are most of your experiences, working with a single country, or was it multiple countries, multiple cultures?

Larry Monuteaux: I would say about half and half, roughly. I’ve done a lot with remote teams since about 2015. Now I’m in a US-based company. Back then, I did a lot more of that. A couple of years ago, right before COVID, I was in a role where I had a team with a couple of people in Shanghai, a couple of people in Pune, and a couple of guys in Europe. My days were meeting-heavy at the beginning and they’d start early. I usually did about half a day at home. I would start my day at five or five-thirty, because it’s already 6 p.m. in Shanghai, so people are already staying late just to meet with me. Then I would head into the office midday and work the remainder of the day on my other stuff.

Mike Kelley: Any other cultural lessons with that group? I have to admit, I’m amazed that you were able to take notes while somebody else was talking because I am horrible at that. I’m staring at the keyboard.

Larry Monuteaux: I don’t know how good I am at it. And everybody had to suffer, maybe watching me peck my way through it. But one of the things I learned in that role and in other roles is that you have to think about each individual person that reports to you and what they might need. Somebody might be like, “I can give you a project.” And I say, “Listen, check in with me when you need to. Let me know how it goes. If you need me for anything.” And then another person I might need to help work with them step-by-step because they’re newer or they are shy or whatever the case may be. Some people need more face time and some people just do their own thing and they don’t want to be bothered. Somebody needs reassurance that they’re doing a good job. Somebody else wants me to be more understanding if they need to have unexpected time off or something. Everybody’s different. And so my job is to figure out what they need to make them happy and successful in their role and to appreciate them personally.

Mike Kelley: As I too have tried to have that servant leader mentality with my teams and my coworkers, I wonder, how was it the first time you had to let somebody go? When you faced that those first few times, how much of a struggle was it? Because I know I struggled with that one.

Larry Monuteaux: That’s awful. I’m not that great at that. I’m more of a carrot person than a stick person, so it’s hard for me to call attention to deficiencies. But that’s necessary too because people learn from that. They’re learning from their mistakes. I’ve had to do that where I had to document issues, and it’s just awful because I try to do everything I can before I have to resort to that, because I want to give them every opportunity to try to improve. And I want to be there for them if they need me. But I’ve had to do that, and there’s no getting around that conversation when you have to have it.

Mike Kelley: It’s a difficult conversation. But one of the things that I found over time, those first few of them were a real struggle for me. But then I’ve also found that there are a lot of times where that time of honesty and that honest appraisal and just being straightforward with them as they’re struggling and acknowledging those struggles gives them that chance to improve those areas. But then, unfortunately, I’ve had some of those coworkers who just acknowledged them and didn’t do anything to change it or continued to do other things that just kept making it worse. And so, like we both said, it’s never fun. But I also found that after I struggled so hard trying to give somebody that carrot so often, that there were times where I hurt them by maintaining it for longer.

Larry Monuteaux: I find that dangerous as well. Being genuine and having time and connecting on a personal level, when the tough conversations have to happen, I think they’re easier because I haven’t been bullshitting them all this time. They can trust me. And I tell them, sometimes I share if I’m frustrated about something else, or I talk to them in confidence about what I think about something at the organization. I’m hoping that I build that rapport so that if they’re having a struggle, maybe they approach me about it. Or if they don’t, when I have to approach them about something, the conversation goes a little smoother, hopefully.

Mike Kelley: For sure. So what are some of the surprising things that you’ve run into in your career? What’s one of the life lessons that you never expected going from being a teacher to doing technology and to leading groups?

Larry Monuteaux: I don’t know if I’m surprised by a lot of things anymore. I think I’m continually low-level surprised by the politics that happens. I know how to recognize that when it happens, and I know how to protect myself, but it’s surprising. I just want to get stuff done. I just want to bring technology solutions to the organization. I don’t want to step on anybody. And it’s surprising to me how many people are focused on that. I just don’t understand what you get out of doing that. I guess I’m continually surprised by that.

Mike Kelley: Along those lines then, how do we help the people that are listening to us, that are struggling with some of that and have no idea how to either separate themselves from it? Because that’s one of the defenses I use, is to separate myself from it and not participate in it, and to focus in on accomplishing the things that I say that I’m going to do or that the team has promised to do. What thoughts do you have around that? What lessons can you help share?

Larry Monuteaux: As part of mentoring, especially for younger people, a lot of that is to help them figure out how to recognize that when it’s happening so that they know enough to take the steps to separate themselves from it, to avoid getting into those conversations and to show them the pitfalls that may be happening, to use examples about other things that happened among other people, because it might not be apparent. Looking back, I can see things that happened at the various companies I’ve been at that I didn’t know at the time. I couldn’t see it because I was too green. I don’t know if I would be a good fit for somebody on my team that was looking to climb the ladder at somebody else’s expense. A lot of times because we are in that support role, I’d hope that we’d want to be on the side of a lot of that stuff.

Mike Kelley: As I look through some of these things, I noticed you prefer a well-thought-out, well-designed approach. What lessons taught you that? Because I’m guessing that with no mentor in the beginning and nobody to really show you the ropes, that’s something that you learn with experience. Is that spending more time planning it out exactly how to implement something is worth a lot more than just going after it? Because there are so many times we as IT were just like, “Hey, I need this,” and we go running off after it.

Larry Monuteaux: I’ve seen the negative results of that so much, especially in smaller orgs where they either don’t have enough of an IT group or don’t have any IT group. I think the ideal position to go into is a company that’s kind of exiting out of that informal phase of its life and it wants to put some policies in place and procedures in place and standards. And I love transforming an org from that to something that has something scalable, repeatable, recorded, logged. It’s because I’ve seen it so many times, “Let’s just get it done.” I’m like, “I know, but we can take just a few minutes more and make a procedure that we can repeat going forward.” And if we do it a certain way, we can do it again and again. We will regret it if we don’t. And it just takes a minute more. A lot of times people are reluctant to do that or they resist it because they either feel like they are going to lose their unique role, maybe if we automate something for example, or they like the fact that they’re the holder of the tribal knowledge. And that’s a touchy situation sometimes. So it requires sometimes you have to bear witness to folks when they tell you all the work that they’ve been doing all this time and how nobody appreciates it. And that’s true. They did all that work and nobody appreciated them. And let’s work together to try to put this system in place to automate that. And we’re going to use your knowledge about the way things worked to design this system because you’re the only one that really knows how all the pieces fit together. My hope is that people are put at ease by that. I certainly need them because I don’t know how it worked. That’s part of project planning, to figure out how it’s worked up till now.

Mike Kelley: What manual processes, for example, do we have to account for? The discovery process of the tribal knowledge. Especially if that tribal knowledge holder is either gone or doesn’t want to share. That’s a huge challenge. And right back into the politics. Although a different branch than the people who are using other bodies to climb.

Larry Monuteaux: This is the, “It’s mine.” There’s a customer service part to that too. It’s the same thing when somebody is super frustrated because of an issue. I like that because not that they’re frustrated, but I like that challenge. I’m going to go and help them and I’m going to listen to them, and I’m going to appreciate the frustration and express to them that it shouldn’t be working this way. And if I can end my interaction with them where they’re happy and feel appreciated for the work that they do. There are too many IT people that perpetuate that opinion about how IT is not your friend. And I want everybody to think that IT is their friend. At every organization I’ve been in, I’ve said to my manager, “You can ask anybody in the company about me anytime, and they will give you a good review, because I treat them all very well and I give them great service.” I don’t want special treatment. I want you to treat me like you treat everybody else.

Mike Kelley: Treating everybody like you’re talking about helps everybody to feel better about IT. But it also makes it where they find you. “Hey, come help me with this. Hey, come help me with that.”

Larry Monuteaux: That’s why I joke to people. Sometimes they are chasing you down, but also sometimes people don’t want to call because they don’t want to bother you. And I’m like, “That’s the whole reason I’m here.” So I make the joke. They say, “Oh, I’m sorry to bother you.” I’m like, “It keeps me from wandering the streets and getting in trouble. I’m glad you called. Keeps me from shopping on Prime Day.” No, but the org presumably has a mission and everybody in that org is working toward that mission. They all have a piece and they all have a part to play, and they all need technology to do that job. And it’s up to me to give them good solutions and also to fix their problems when they happen.

Mike Kelley: Let’s change tack a little bit. What’s the biggest success that you had that started as a failure?

Larry Monuteaux: I started at this company, and I didn’t really know what was going on. I had only been there a month or so, and I came on to be the Citrix guy because they had a lot of Citrix apps. This company had a ton of apps. This is back in the XP days, so there were a lot more application installs than browser stuff. Anyway, they wanted to build a DMZ for the first time, and this was a financial institution. So they needed secure access to things. They never really had a remote access solution. And this is before everything is in the cloud, so everything’s on-premise. We had a massive data center. To do anything, you needed to be on-site or you needed to be able to get in remotely. And our remote access solution was publishing applications through Citrix. So, I was the Citrix guy, and I had this big Citrix farm, but they wanted to make a DMZ to make that remote access secure. They wanted to bring people in through a load balancer, and they chose the Citrix NetScaler, which is a product that Citrix bought. It’s a reverse proxy and load balancer appliance. And I had never worked with it before. I knew conceptually what a DMZ was, but this project to implement it didn’t have a scope or goals. They had a consultant that I don’t really know if he really understood the NetScaler or how to use it. I was on that project with the head of the network team, who was great on the network side but really didn’t take to the reverse proxy thing. So I thought this project was failing, and I wasn’t really sure what the goals were. I had just started. So I talked to my director about all of that. And he was a guy that you could talk to, so that was nice. And I said, “We really need someone else to come in and help us implement this.” I’m happy to learn everything. I learned the inside and outside of the NetScaler. And we implemented a DMZ, and it became crucial to our remote access solution. It became the way that people connected in remotely when there was a snowstorm or if they were sick. There wasn’t as much working from home back then, but it became a possibility that you could actually do everything that you could do in the office remotely because of all these apps that we published securely. It became the load balancer in front of our secure file transfers with other financial institutions. That stuff gets encrypted and transferred. Anything going in and out of our premise was fed through this device, this proxy. And eventually, it became a big deal in our disaster recovery plan because, again, with everything on-premise, we had a warm site and we were replicating data. And ideally, four times a year we would go over to this hot site on a Saturday and cut the link and see what we could recover from what had been replicated. We had an associated appliance at the hot site that was handling it, so in a disaster, you would reconnect remotely. But if the main site had been destroyed by a disaster, you didn’t know any better. You might not even know, but you would connect to the disaster recovery site instead. So it was a huge success ultimately. And I never thought it would be any success at all when we started. I never really liked that appliance, but I learned a lot about load balancers and reverse proxies, and it was a great experience, and I’m glad to have worked on it.

Mike Kelley: You said this was back in the XP days. What era? That’s like the early or mid-2000s?

Larry Monuteaux: It was about 2006, I think.

Mike Kelley: And so when I think of DMZ, I’m thinking of a hardened web server that goes out in the DMZ, and then you’ve got the corporate network behind it. For the Citrix environment that you’re talking about, the users would log in to basically a web page and then get access to Citrix and then have access to the internal network?

Larry Monuteaux: We had a Citrix Web Interface server, eventually called StoreFront, in the DMZ. So from the outside, you could only ever get to the DMZ through this device. And then that device in turn had access internally. So you never directly accessed anything internally. Everything was proxied for you, kind of like NAT. When you’re going outbound, you all go out as the same IP address. When you’re coming in, this is a reverse proxy, so everything that’s accessed internally is accessed by the IP of the device, not by the end-user, wherever they may be.

Mike Kelley: Which is pretty early into that capability at that time. So many organizations had to understand and learn and just grab that by the horns back in 2020, but you’re talking thirteen, fourteen years before that.

Larry Monuteaux: I hate to say that it’s maybe easier now, but a lot of things are in the cloud now, so you just need to tell people what the URL is. If you’re an Office 365 shop, you don’t have to bring people in remotely to get their email. They just get their email the same way that they always did. When you have a big data center, and all the shared files and the corporate apps, and especially if you’re a financial institution…

Mike Kelley: They definitely wanted to protect the money, go figure.

Larry Monuteaux: Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to go back to the days of having a big data center. You have to make sure that power is redundant and networking is redundant, and all your appliances, firewalls, and switches are redundant, and cooling, and do you need a generator? Do you have fire suppression? All that stuff that people don’t have to think about anymore. You can start a company today, and you just need an internet pipe. You might not even really need an office, depending on what you’re doing. Everything’s in the cloud.

Mike Kelley: It’s amazing how a small company today can spin up so many things so fast, without even knowing all of the fundamentals that we had to learn and understand to be able to build the infrastructures that we did back then.

Larry Monuteaux: On the one hand, the people that really need to know that stuff now are the people that work at AWS or Azure or hosting that stuff or colo places. But on the other hand, it’s a very risky time right now where people are deploying things and those systems are talking to other systems, either other parts of AWS or across clouds to Google or Azure or whatever. And they don’t really know as much about the way that communication ought to happen to secure it properly. And I think that that’s a risky thing, and you see sometimes that that gets exploited. But I’m afraid that there’s a lot more out there that’s insecure. It was easier in the old days, in a way, because you had one way in, and your firewall was this big, important thing. Now I like zero trust where no host trusts any other hosts, and that’s nice, but it takes a lot to get there, especially if you’re having different systems talking to each other across different networks, across different clouds. What traffic is that? What are you opening to?

Mike Kelley: That architecture needs to be as well thought out as an on-prem architecture, even more well-thought-out, I think. Because once you’re inside the walls, it’s easier to take for granted that the level of communication between systems inside of a physical, constrained building is one thing. But when it’s a physical, constrained building with all kinds of different tenants and different companies and multiple people using the exact same hardware, there are ways that it’s not as secure as it used to be because of the fundamental separation.

Larry Monuteaux: Part of what you’re paying for when you subscribe to a SaaS is not having to think about that. But just because you’re not thinking about it and you’re paying for it doesn’t mean it’s being done.

Mike Kelley: That’s right. Exactly. That’s the danger. It’s the things that we need to learn today to make sure that we can vet, to keep our organization safe. Throughout your career, what’s a legacy system or some kind of system technology that you saw get retired, that you think was retired too soon?

Larry Monuteaux: Is there anything out there like that? I don’t know if I thought it was retired too soon, but it was bittersweet to see both NetWare go and Citrix. Citrix is still around. I remember being a big network person and learning NetWare from three, NetWare four, NetWare five, and comparing it to the flat NT 4.0 domain and how it was a nice, LDAP-compliant hierarchy with a tree, and it seemed elegant to me. Little did I know, Group Policy didn’t exist back then, but Active Directory came out and I’m like, “Oh, they’re just trying to copy Novell.” And then it became clear that not only are they going to compete well, but they’re going to win. I had to do some kind of a shell game to get my company switched over to Active Directory. But then I learned about Group Policy, and I loved Group Policy back in the day. I still don’t think you can do everything today, or at least in 2025, with just Intune policies and things that you can with the old Group Policy. Now, obviously, that was designed for an on-prem user base. But I was sad to see Novell go because that was a big deal for me. That was the first thing I felt like I was an expert in in my career. I like it when if I have to call tech support, they immediately escalate me, because if I’m calling, it’s not the level one or level two issue. The same thing with Citrix. Citrix is still out there, but there are a lot fewer things that you have to publish today. Mostly, most new development is web-based. Building PCs is a lot easier today. With Intune deployment, it’s even easier. You install the operating system, you get Office and Adobe on it, and you’re done, because mostly people are living in their browser all day. They might have thirty tabs open, but they used to have thirty applications running. Migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 was a massive project for us because we had to find out of the hundreds and hundreds of applications that we had in the organization, how many were compatible with Windows 7 and how many did we have to figure out some other solution for. Those days are gone now, but I loved my Citrix farm, and I had it tuned just perfectly. People were load-balanced among the server farm and some people didn’t really notice that they were running an application remotely. They thought it might have been installed. Citrix was maybe the biggest example of something that I didn’t know anything about. I went to a class at this company because I was going to be the backup Citrix guy. I went to the class and it was a terrible class. It was a week-long class and I came back and they’re like, “Well, what do you think?” I’m like, “I don’t know. The guy wasn’t really that great. I know enough to be the backup. I’ll pick it up.” They’re like, “Well, you’re going to need to do more than that because Brian just gave his notice and you’re the primary guy.” I’m like, “Well, alright.” So I took another class with a great instructor, and that started me off. I started off in Citrix MetaFrame 1.8 and that was on NT 4.0. And I did Citrix upgrades all the way up to XenApp. The consultant that we had that did the NetScaler asked me if I wanted to go and work for him because he did Citrix, NetScaler, and XenApp and all that stuff. And that was a lot of fun to do that. The virtualization on that side of it was really fun. And then virtual desktop was even better in a way, with VMware View, and then it became Horizon. But I don’t see a lot of Citrix XenApp around as much anymore, except if it’s a specialty app that hasn’t been converted to a web version of it yet.

Mike Kelley: Okay.

Larry Monuteaux: We have an app that we use on the accounting side that’s web-based, but then there are a couple of functions that aren’t in there yet. So they run a Citrix client and connect to it and run basically the Windows version of that app on-premise at the company we buy it from. And eventually, I think that’ll go away too because they’ll build that functionality. It’s on their development pipeline, I’m sure, and they’ll bring it into the web interface and then they won’t need that anymore. And that’s sad and bittersweet. Citrix used to have its own conference, and that was a big deal.

Mike Kelley: So with you doing that at that time, you were on the leading edge of remote utilization, hybrid connectivity, those kinds of things that are commonplace today. It makes me wonder what leading-edge things are you getting to play with today? What’s keeping you interested in IT and keeping you challenged? Because if you were doing that back in 2010, most organizations didn’t start doing that until 2015 or later.

Larry Monuteaux: Right now we’re looking at… well, property management and financial services, which is basically the parent of property management because these are all assets, are very change-averse, and they’re slower in updating. And it’s not just us, it’s all property management companies. So the exciting thing now is that we’re looking at what we can do with all of the data that we get in a building. So you have an office building and there’s a lot of data generated in that building about occupancy, where people are and what floors they’re on, and which ones are vacant and which ones aren’t, and what hours people work. And that data can ultimately inform heating and cooling to be more sustainable, to be more energy-efficient. In an office building, there are hundreds and hundreds of pieces of equipment that keep the building running—chillers and air handlers and filters—hundreds of these devices and those all need to be managed and maintained, and preventative maintenance is done on all of them on widely varying schedules. A complex machine might have eight different separately warranted items in it. So how do we pull all that data about all the equipment and its age and the past maintenance that’s been done on it, past repair work that’s been done on it, what’s its expected life, and how much it costs to maintain it, both in terms of regular maintenance as well as repair? And make intelligent decisions about how long we should keep this piece of equipment or projections to budget, say, across your portfolio of properties. You might want a system that could… this is kind of like an AI-driven thing, so you train it and feed it with the data that you collate from all your buildings and say, “Okay, in the next budget year, you should budget X amount because you’re going to probably need to replace this list of equipment in these buildings, or you’re going to spend this much predictably in your repairs.” So you can better plan budget-wise for predictive maintenance, preventative maintenance, and creating budgets around both of those for the next year or five years. That’s kind of interesting because a lot of that stuff is still done on spreadsheets and some of it’s still done on paper. So the challenge is opportunities. Talk about tribal knowledge, we had a building where the people that run it, the engineers that keep the building going, they’re usually a third-party company. They staff the engineering group and there will be a chief that’s an employee of ours, and then his crew is from this company. They had to do a layoff, and the guy that they laid off had been at that building for 26 years. And he was picked to be laid off because he was the newest guy; all the other guys had been there longer. So talk about tribal knowledge. A lot of this stuff is in these guys’ heads. They know that machine, and this one is temperamental. And that stuff is not captured anywhere. So to try to collate that, and that’s just one building, to collate that across a portfolio of buildings over a million square feet or whatever, that’s an interesting thing that we’re starting to think about.

Mike Kelley: And that also, thinking about the buildings and everything else, really makes one of your statements from earlier land: the private rental public network. Having to have all of those and set those up and then also wanting to leverage, I’m sure, economies of scale. So if you’ve got multiple buildings, especially multiple buildings that are within proximity of each other, where you can run fiber in between them or get connectivity between them, you want to leverage that capability.

Larry Monuteaux: That would be ideal. And I’ve had people reach out for me to take surveys on smart buildings and dealing with those kinds of things to do what you’re talking about. But recognizing the fact that many buildings have been there for a while. They’re doing lots of things like putting grass on the roofs of the buildings, and there are competitions to be… there are certifications that a building can get. You can walk into an office building and there’ll be a LEED emblem on the front of the building because that building achieved that certification of being energy efficient.

Mike Kelley: I hadn’t seen those, but I’m out here in the Southwest where we still got lots of room to grow out.

Larry Monuteaux: Companies are struggling with getting people back to the office because I like to work remotely too. But companies, and my company, they want everybody in the office, all their tenants to have all their people in the office because that’s where they get the value out of the office. So then the question is, what sorts of things can we use to attract people to come in? That means putting in the gym or ping pong tables and lounges and roof decks and all that kind of stuff so that people want to be there. It becomes a cool place to be. And all that stuff has technology, whether it’s a TV or Wi-Fi or music.

Mike Kelley: It’s exciting. All kinds of different challenges. Well, Larry, this has been an awesome conversation. I’ve really enjoyed our time. I want to give you a chance to promote anything that you’ve been doing.

Larry Monuteaux: In my spare time, I am a practitioner of Stoicism. I’m a Stoic, and I’m part of a group called Modern Stoics. Modern Stoicism is a little different than regular Stoicism in that there’s not as much of a focus on the gods when you talk about ancient Stoics like Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. It’s more about the ethics of how to live and how to be a good person and how to make your way in the world and achieve what they call a smooth-flowing life, which is sometimes translated as happiness, but it’s really more satisfaction in life. And this group that I’m involved in is called Conversations with Modern Stoicism. They have a monthly Zoom every once a month on a Saturday, and they have a Stoic expert come in and talk about, say, either grief or being fair or journaling, things like that. We have a vibrant WhatsApp community and it’s a lot of fun. And it’s definitely informed my professional life as well. One of the pieces of Stoicism is that you try not to let things that are out of your control bother you. And as an IT leader, that’s crucial. I help to run a book club where we read Stoic texts from either ancient sources or modern sources, and we meet to discuss those books. And it’s great fun.

Mike Kelley: How do people find you if they want to join that or if they want to learn or see about mentoring?

Larry Monuteaux: They can go to modernstoicism.com. And I can send you a link to the Conversations group. We’re actually having a meeting coming up.

Mike Kelley: All right. Awesome. Thank you very much for your time today.

Larry Monuteaux: Thank you. Talking to you, sir.

Mike Kelley: You too. Thanks a lot.

Larry Monuteaux: Thank you. Bye-bye.

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HOSTED BY PHIL HOWARD

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