Speaker 0 | 00:09.584

All right. Welcome, everyone, back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we have Bill Genovese on the show. And interesting subjects today. Very excited to have you on the show, first of all, Bill. So, thank you. And you have been in… China for the last four years of your life on a working a pretty significant contract. Why don’t we just, you know, why don’t we just start there? Where were you in China? Because this is, you know, especially with COVID and everything going on, this is, I have a feeling there might be a story here or two. So where were you in China?

Speaker 1 | 00:51.351

I was in Shenzhen, China, which is probably the largest southern based city. And in China, right on the border of mainland China and Hong Kong, the population of about 14, 15 million people.

Speaker 0 | 01:06.948

And the China is interesting because I have a lot of manufacturers in China and various different IT leaders that I work with. And the question is always like, how do I get around the Chinese firewall? Because every now and then the Chinese government goes into. I don’t know, their Congress, their form of Congress, whatever it is. And I lost all my VPN connections. So how can I get around this and make sure that we can do this safely? It usually has some, the solution typically is a data center on mainland China that is owned 49% by some cloud company in the United States and or Israel. And we’ve got a connection to Hong Kong. So we go from mainland China to Hong Kong and then we ride whatever network. back to the United States. Anyways, just a little side piece here, but you worked for Huawei, which is really spelled completely different, right? With an H. But what were you doing over there? What were you contracted for?

Speaker 1 | 02:11.946

Yeah, I was working in the corporate strategy group and I was vice president of corporate strategy for global banking and financial markets. That is pretty vertical at the corporate level. across four divisions.

Speaker 0 | 02:26.397

And what does that really mean though from them? Because they’re mainly a telecom company, you know, some from like a tech nerdy, you know, position. What were you like, what were these various different divisions? Like, you know, what did they basically do?

Speaker 1 | 02:38.063

Yeah. I mean, and Huawei has basically four divisions. They have a consumer and they’re really not like, unlike any other company in the world in terms of the breadth and the, and the ground that they cover. So they have four divisions, a consumer division. which very much maps in a similar fashion, you could say, to Apple or Samsung. So they make smart devices, smartphones, watches, laptops, you know, Fitbit type health monitors. They have a cloud division, which is the newest division. So they have public cloud in China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Johannesburg, South Africa. Huawei also builds public clouds, the gear. However. for major telcos. So Orange Business Services, that’s all Huawei technology behind that cloud. So if a customer contracts and hosts with Orange, Telefonica, or Deutsche Telekom, Open Telecom Cloud in Europe and some other countries, that’s Huawei gear. Okay. But commercially, those telcos provide the hosting. But they also own, they also provide their own public cloud in those countries, Huawei that I mentioned. The other divisions are enterprise business group that works in seven industry verticals. And they sell infrastructure primarily. So if a bank or a manufacturer or a transportation company, government, public sector entity wants to buy servers for compute, storage or network gear, they would work within Huawei enterprise business group.

Speaker 0 | 04:15.788

Gotcha. So they’re like the, they’re like the, basically the, the telco giant. One of the, well, they are the telco giant of the world, basically, you know, from manufacturing of devices to general like infrastructure, like physical infrastructure to cloud infrastructure all the way to even, what about termination?

Speaker 1 | 04:36.274

Yeah, they do some of that as well, I believe too with, with, you know, through the carrier angle and that’s the last division. So that’s the oldest division. That’s how Huawei was born.

Speaker 0 | 04:46.045

Always is the oldest. You know what I mean? How did we make a collect call? How did we make calls and, you know, and terminate phone numbers? For some reason, that’s always the old division. Still trying to get rid of it.

Speaker 1 | 04:56.870

That’s how they got their start is by selling communications gear to telcos in China. Yeah. You know, that’s, that’s how they started in the eighties. So, um, you know, they do,

Speaker 0 | 05:10.767

what were you doing from a technology perspective to say, grow the business?

Speaker 1 | 05:16.932

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 05:17.072

While we think that way though, to begin with, were you even thinking like, were you brought in to grow the business?

Speaker 1 | 05:20.855

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 05:21.515

And it’s interesting because, you know, you weren’t just brought in to, I mean, to keep the blinky lights on and the servers working and, and, and user supported, like you were brought in to grow the business from a technology, technology perspective. And how did you do that?

Speaker 1 | 05:32.997

Yeah, I mean, Huawei was attacking that industry vertical. They were attracted to me, and they brought me in based on my over-a-decade experience in IBM and financial services. Okay, that was one thing. And then I worked for KPMG before that, and I worked for a number of startups in technology and working with financial services. And they never felt… that they were really getting enough market share based on everything that they had under the roof in terms of capability and the reason was these were individual businesses and p l’s that were attacking that industry at different inflection points or different target customer segments you know consumer finance versus traditional banks versus telcos getting into financial services it was a vertical play I came in and I kind of pivoted things that made it more horizontal, okay, end-to-end portfolio, okay, in terms of next generation digital services, you know, and connecting, for lack of a better term or a cliche, the real economy, consumer finance, with the market economy, which are the banks and everything in between, okay? So instead of attacking them separately, Okay. And having individual P&Ls, how can we connect the dots? And ironically, what reinforced that and validated that, that horizontal pivot was COVID.

Speaker 0 | 07:07.886

And the reason just to speak in more layman’s terms for anyone that might not be understanding any of this, AKA myself. No, I do understand it, but the, basically we’ve got multiple silos, business silos here and you’re, you’re for lack of a better terms, I don’t want to say consolidating, but unifying, unifying various different business silos and P&Ls, profit and loss statements, operating costs and everything, kind of bringing it. Is that a correct statement?

Speaker 1 | 07:36.347

Well, at a higher level, at the corporate strategy level, but it’s more solution development and architecture and tech. Each of those P&Ls and divisions, the consumer division,

Speaker 0 | 07:47.133

for example. Does this have to apply to financial services or would this apply to any business?

Speaker 1 | 07:53.677

pharmaceutical manufacturing or anything or healthcare or whatever logistics yeah it was more dramatic in financial services because i was the only individual at the corporate strategy level in corporate that was tasked to do this for an industry vertical so you did not have somebody at corporate strategy overseeing manufacturing across the company or public sector okay um Because those industries and how they went to market were pretty much catered to in one of the divisions, which is enterprise business group. But at financial services, each of the divisions was getting a piece of the pie, but it was not coordinated horizontally to get most of the market share or more of the market share that the company can get. So

Speaker 0 | 08:42.322

I need an example here. Let’s do a… Just give me some sort of example, like a very simple, simplistic example for me.

Speaker 1 | 08:53.436

Yeah. Yeah. So the way that I kind of simplified this is really based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which a lot of people are.

Speaker 0 | 09:02.861

I like that. Yeah. Like the dog jumping over the box or into the box or whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 09:08.484

I mean, you don’t have to be a financial guru to understand that we consume financial services really for three basic needs. We got to pay for stuff. OK, we have to pay for goods, services, so on and so forth. And we need to do it quickly. OK, COVID reinforced that. We cannot go to a laptop computer necessarily all the time or we cannot go pay somebody via a paper check. We need to do it from our damn phone. OK, it needs to be 24-7 instant. OK, that’s number one. If we can’t pay for things, we don’t have enough money. We need to borrow. We can’t jump in our car in COVID and go down to the bank branch and wait five to seven days to get a loan approved or even a day. OK, we need instant credit. We need microfinance. It needs to be done from the edge, from the phone. So credit and lending is number two. Number three is is asset protection. And this really covers deposits, savings. investment. So if we have extra money, what are we going to do with it? Once again, we’re not going to make an appointment with a broker, okay, and go sit in his office. We want to do things like Robinhood, Acorn Stash on an application at no fees and invest our money from our phone. Okay. Same with insurance.

Speaker 0 | 10:33.133

With no fees. Just a complete side note, this is like just dropping like a, this is like dropping a whole nother subject bomb into this, but Yeah. And I need your like 15 second opinion on Bitcoin or your opinion in general on blockchain type of like, you know, money. Is this going to help like kind of like a global coin, so to speak? Is this going to help speed up this process in the future, do you believe? Or is it a load of crap because it’s not based on, you know, any type of physical entity or anything other than, you know, I don’t know, guys solving math problems?

Speaker 1 | 11:07.976

It already has proven its validity. Okay. I mean, and COVID reinforced that. I mean, I’m a believer in both the underlying tech blockchain, and I’m also a believer in Bitcoin as well as other digital assets and other digital coins. Okay. And, you know,

Speaker 0 | 11:27.296

the… I think from a sustainability piece for, or helping, you know, what you mentioned, microloans and stuff like that, or people may be in, you know, some local farmer in Africa who’s getting, you know, killed by some local bank or something like that. He might be able to… sell on a global marketplace a lot easier with a kind of unified form of, I don’t know, paying and receiving of money.

Speaker 1 | 11:51.934

Not only that, but at the state government level too, China is all in on blockchain and they’re all in on the digital RMB in terms of a national currency. So they have their own blockchain services network that they’re developing. They’ve actually pumped out their digital RMB in terms of what they call red packets. Okay. So these are little envelopes that show up in terms of consumers on their cell phones. You open it and it’s like, boom, here’s 200 RMB. Go spend it at Alibaba or our local merchant that takes it, a restaurant. We want you to start using the digital currency and pump it through the system. Okay. So, and they’re doing this as an alternative to Bitcoin. OK, because they kind of see in some cases capital fleeing the country with Bitcoin and some of the other non-state sponsored digital currencies. So it’s going to happen. OK, the U.S. is behind the curve a bit. But I just, you know, I shared posted an article today that the Boston Fed with MIT is starting to look at a pilot for digital dollar starting in July. OK, so we’re going in this direction. The world is going in this direction. To some extent, you may argue, well, we’ve already kind of been there with credit cards and electronic funds processing is digital. But the actual denomination or currencyization has not happened yet. We’re still using paper money, checks and things of this nature.

Speaker 0 | 13:26.567

So anyways, pre-COVID, pre… It’s an interesting dynamic. I usually don’t get into politics. I’m not sharing opinions or anything. But it must have been interesting pre-COVID to COVID to Trump administration, all of this stuff, working in China during that time. Now you’re back in the United States after your contract is up. Where should I begin with this? Why did you work? What’s your general advice to… other IT leaders, people looking to understand, grow in the business technology world more, what would your advice be when it comes to working overseas or globally? Why did you do that to begin with? What was your, was it just like, Hey, this could be exciting. I work overseas and that’s cool. And is that, was that the initial draw to it? And why, you know, and why would you advise people to do that?

Speaker 1 | 14:20.499

Yeah. I mean, well, my, you know, my, my focus in my career has always been enterprise architecture. So not so much specialization in one technology, but going broader and deeper, you know, across the stacks and down into the different layers of the stacks and industry business models as well. And my advice would be to any IT leader is anybody presents an opportunity for you to go live and work in a foreign country, whether that’s patterned very much like the United States in terms of AKA Europe or completely different. you know, Middle East or Asia, China, I would recommend jumping at the opportunity, okay, because it exposes you to so many different diverse perspectives from culture and now how things are done in a business environment and how technology is enabled and applied is completely different. So… You know, that’s been instrumental in my career. Okay. And it’s helped me in terms of performance coming back in and out of the United States three or four times throughout the last 15 years. And I always come back in with a wider and deeper perspective and I’m able to spot things in U.S. environments quicker from a differentiation perspective that I haven’t seen before. Okay.

Speaker 0 | 15:43.630

Coming back, what do you… Is there any examples that you can give me there? I’m just curious what you would spot like right away. Would it be our vast amount of money we spent on infrastructure and lack of maybe spending in another area?

Speaker 1 | 15:56.743

Yeah, I would say integration, how things kind of tie together and interoperate and how digital transformation can be accelerated. You know, we have more islands of legacy infrastructure, silos and data centers. There’s exceptions to what I’m saying, of course. The adoption of open standards, distributed architectures and platforms at a real massive scale level. We haven’t broken out of some of these silos yet based on industry verticals.

Speaker 0 | 16:33.597

So for a business person, maybe listening to this show, which is highly unlikely unless I just send it to them, but like, you know, mostly nerds listening to this show, but let’s… What does that translate for a business owner? And the reason why I’m asking this is so that another IT person can explain this to a business owner. Why should they care about this? How can coming in and removing silos and tying things together and integrating and bringing in a better enterprise architecture and being able to analyze it from a much more diverse perspective, what does that mean to the bottom line of the business and growth?

Speaker 1 | 17:10.311

I’m glad you said that because there’s a quote that I developed and I used in all of my briefings and I still do. And it’s really business owner oriented or business oriented in the sense that if you view your business, if you view infrastructure as a commodity and it doesn’t matter who you go with and it’s just I need servers, I need storage, I need network here, then you should view your business as a commodity because you will get disrupted. OK, that’s the first point. So. Tied to that from a business strategy perspective as an owner, are you going to stay in your lane or are you going to move into other lanes to grow and scale? Okay, so this is the example of Google, Amazon, bigger players moving into other industry verticals that are traditionally not their own and they had no business going into, but they’re dominating and COVID has kind of reinforced that. Okay, so they didn’t get there. OK, by viewing their infrastructure as a commodity and it didn’t matter. OK, you know, they went to open standards, open, open technologies, open source, and they were able to scale horizontally and integrate and bring other services and acquisitions in and make them a utility. OK, so that that’s a key point.

Speaker 0 | 18:28.936

Yeah, I think you just blew it out of the water there. And. Just to take a few seconds for anyone out there listening, if you like this type of stuff, if you like this conversation, if you find this to be valuable, speaking of massive technology disruptors, there are only four really massive major sources of traffic in the digital world. And that is Google, Apple, Amazon, and what am I forgetting? Oh, Facebook, of course. So from a podcast perspective. For me, speaking very selfishly, if you like this podcast, that would mean my traffic comes from Apple, aka iTunes, whatever we call that. Please Google Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And when you see the little, you know, Apple, iTunes, whatever pop up, because it is going to be the first thing that pops up when you Google it using Google, please click on it. Scroll down to the bottom. Give me your honest review of the show, please, because we need reviews in order for this show to grow. And I really only need about 140 reviews for us to make this into the top 100, maybe top 10 podcasts there. That’s me crunching the numbers. Now, moving on. That was very, very useful. If you view infrastructure as a commodity, then you should view your business as a commodity. And are you going to stay in your own lane? So you mentioned some of the big giants out there, Google, etc. Do you think they’re going to come in and take over? Is the old world of telecom in the United States doomed? I personally happen to think that it’s going to get snuffed out by Microsoft Teams or, you know, Google Voice and, you know, Google coming in and building out their infrastructure. I think some infrastructure stuff will always be there. But what do you think of the vast worlds of the AT&Ts and the Verizons of the world and all the other little men in between in the C-Lex and everything? Are we doomed? Is there going to be a massive change over the next five years?

Speaker 1 | 20:29.541

Yeah, I mean, unless we, you know, I don’t want to get into politics either, but unless we kind of open this up in terms of open innovation, and it’s a very touchy subject, okay? And we either have to grow organically in terms of capability in tech and innovation to develop technology to keep ahead or catch up, okay, with other countries in the world, or we need to be able to partner. very creatively. Okay. And this goes down to our major flagship carriers. Okay. Because we’re going to get left behind the eight ball war. These, the, the GAFA giants, you know, Google, Apple, so on and so forth are going to start to develop their own and Facebook’s already doing it. There’s a, there’s a, they’re developing their own networking gear. Okay. There’s a very, very well-known.

Speaker 0 | 21:23.280

So from a manufacturing standpoint, you’re saying.

Speaker 1 | 21:25.990

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they’re developing white box networking gear. They’re plugged into what’s called the open daylight project, which is all around open source network gear. Okay. So, you know, you’re going to start to see more disruptions of the bottlenecks where there were only a handful of providers on a global level making this stuff and everybody else had to kind of line up and buy it from them, you know, but that kind of presents a bottleneck in terms of tech as well. Okay. So The giants are going to look to keep driving open source and open innovation. And Facebook, Google are developing their own data centers and technology. So satellite, there was a couple of failed experiments. Google Loon, which was the balloon type thing to very high altitude internet distribution using balloons, weather balloons over emerging markets. But these types of solutions, Starlink from Elon Musk. I mean, you know, there’s how many thousands of those up there right now? You know, and I’m a believer in a company called GSAT, Global Star. Okay, they’re out of Baton Rouge, I think, Louisiana. And they’re doing all kinds of hardware connectivity for satellite communications. Okay, for internet. Okay. And this is just going to continue. Okay.

Speaker 0 | 22:55.520

Could we be able to get around the latency issue there? We’re still going the speed of light, right? I mean, we’re just under the speed of light, but I’m just curious with latency issues and stuff with the satellite. I’m just curious. It’s definitely getting better.

Speaker 1 | 23:08.791

And it’s getting crowded up there too, you know, so, you know, that’s the other thing. So, but I mean, I use that as a broad example because, you know, it’s going to, it’s going to create a need. For innovation pockets like this, where you’re not going to be kind of ham hocked by the traditional providers anymore. And there’s going to be other entrants getting into it. OK, and, you know, the giants in terms of big tech are not going to stop and stay in their lane. OK, they’re going to move into other areas.

Speaker 0 | 23:42.931

You mentioned a rocket ship trajectory earlier. And we were talking about it as you worked overseas, but you said if you hadn’t worked in Singapore first, when we were talking earlier, just chit-chatting, you wouldn’t have been prepared for China. So that, I guess that was just, that was just how everything worked out for you. But, you know, for anyone else, they might not go to Singapore first. They might go straight to China or whatever. But what was it about Singapore? Well, I mean, just what I mean,

Speaker 1 | 24:15.159

my background has always been kind of at the intersection of heavily regulated industries like banking, financial services, combined with architectural rigor, risk and compliance and regulations and security. OK,

Speaker 0 | 24:29.010

and just to, again, drop side notes in here, would that be helpful for companies that are, say, not regulated? To take someone that has worked in a very highly regulated industry and bring them into, say, an industry that’s not as regulated, would that be beneficial to them?

Speaker 1 | 24:49.061

Well, the emphasis point is architecture. If you come up on the architecture engineering side, invariably, regardless of industry, you’re going to look to bake in security at all layers in terms of a discipline and behavioral thinking. OK, and if I did not go through some of that rigor in the United States and our regulations and then the Europe, OK, and I took that very pedantic approach to things and I went into Singapore, OK, and things moved a little bit quicker because they’ve they’ve they’ve kind of solved some of those issues. Okay. And, and they are very regulated country. Okay. But I kind of assumed that I would have to go through those steps and, you know, very, very, very pedantic and careful before solutions or products got kind of shipped out the door from, from design to development to production. Okay. And things just moved a lot quicker. Okay. And that, that kind of held me up a bit. Same, same to a certain extent, you know, the regulations and security framework in China and Singapore are not the same as Europe or the United States. So you can’t go in kind of with that blueprint in your mind thinking, you’ve got to go through all of these steps first before something could be productionalized or implemented. And it’s a different set of rules. Okay. And, you know, so that’s what, that’s what I learned. Okay. And I came out of the back end of that. Well, Okay, well, our regulations and our rules are not any more stringent than what goes on in some of these other countries. They’re just applied differently.

Speaker 0 | 26:34.790

Now, when you say applied differently, and Tandik, am I pronouncing that right? You know, as a creative writing English major, we’ve got to do the word of the day, and that would necessarily, I guess the definition, correct, would be narrowly focused on any particular. one thing um and you’re saying not to be that way to be more flexible i would say more creative but still be able to apply the same principles to the situation at hand yeah okay um that’s uh fairly mind-blowing uh because i’m sure there’s a lot of yeah i guess that would come down to the why is everyone so obsessed with certifications and doing things a specific way. Would you say that that’s a, would you say that that’s a true statement in the United States? A lot of IT people are obsessed with certifications and following maps and protocols and stuff like this. And are you saying we need to be able to step out of that box?

Speaker 1 | 27:36.037

No, I’m just saying those certifications and protocols need to be modernized, you know, so they take into account more of the China way of doing things, the Asian country way of doing things. And, you know, this is where government and politics get in the way of each other. And, you know, the superpowers, you know, not even mentioning Russia, too. OK, and their protocols and compliance, you know, but it’s not to say life’s never about absolutes. And there’s examples where China, Russia, the West, other countries, African emerging countries have kind of gotten to the point with technology protocols where they’re open and they’re interoperable and they’re working together. I’m just saying that, you know, you can’t go in with, you know, a menu of 10 certifications that you learned in the West, the United States or Europe and think you know everything. And then you’re going to go apply them in China or other Asian countries and say, this is the rule of the law. OK, and you need to adopt to this. You know, you’re going to get bounced right out on your, you know, and this is more or less. Well, that’s good, but that’s not how we do things in China. or align with the government and our protocols and our standards and rules.

Speaker 0 | 28:55.951

For anyone out there listening to the show, your advice to people listening, how can someone come into a new organization? What kind of questions do they need to ask or see? In your opinion, how fast could you go into a new organization? Say, I don’t know. anything like we were talking about earlier, you know, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, logistics, maybe something outside of even the financial industry. How, what would you look at and how fast could you make a financial impact? And I mean, impact as far as new revenue coming into the business, how fast could you make an impact and what would you look for?

Speaker 1 | 29:41.998

Yeah. I mean, generally for me, you know, the questions I start to look at and analyze is go-to-market, the business footprint, where they’re operating, okay, you know, if they have an international presence, what countries they’re working in, the level of business in each of those locations, okay, because any strategy that I develop… You know, are they looking to scale further in those locations or expand further into other markets? OK, and then I would start to look at, you know, regulatory compliance and how they’re meeting the demands internationally and how friendly outside their home country are those governments are working with them. Typically for me, the number that pops into my mind in terms of me to get traction and really start making an impact. But we’re talking at the corporate level across multiple lines of business is anywhere from, I would say, nine to 18 months, maybe upwards of 24 months to get things completely pivoted at the international level and into execution mode. Okay, because in this context, Phil, in answering that question is really more from me coming into an international location as an American. and getting my head completely around what’s going on, you know, from a global perspective. Now, if it’s within the U S it’s different. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 31:10.108

What if it’s a U S based company just operating within the U S?

Speaker 1 | 31:13.269

Yeah, that could be under six months. No question.

Speaker 0 | 31:16.069

Really? Okay. And what would you, um, are we looking particularly at, you know, in my head, the one thing that you said that really popped out was meeting demands. Are we really looking at, you know, Hey, who are we serving and how are we serving them and how are we going to do it better? Is that, you know, is that the main question?

Speaker 1 | 31:31.870

That is the main question. So I wouldn’t even, you know, there’s a CIO, CTO, advisor coming in, even maybe to the board. I would want to know what the business strategy is and what are the top three to five strategic imperatives for the business? You know, you know, are you looking to expand? Are you attacking the market? Do you even know who your target customers are? Okay. You know, what’s your total addressable market, but, and service addressable market, but. But most importantly, what’s your SOP? Where do you plan on operating service operational market to get market share? Again, a lot of companies can’t answer that. You know, they can say, well, we’re kind of broadly here in terms of total addressable or even service addressable. But when it gets down to nuts and bolts, where are we planning on operating to get market share? They can’t get to that service operational market number.

Speaker 0 | 32:28.468

Just the fact that you just said all of that is. Really very, very valuable to anyone out there listening. To be able to go in and confidently say in the United States, I could make a change within six months. And you know that because you’re going to ask what’s the business strategy? What are the top three to five, I guess, what target markets or target customers that you’re serving? How are you meeting their demands? And then you can take that information and apply it to the network. to be able to take that information and apply it to the network and improve the network. What are some of the top, what would you say are some of the biggest holes that you’ve seen? Kind of the, when I go in, there’s always a problem with this or there’s a problem with that. What would you say are the top five areas that we’re missing in network infrastructure? And I know you only have about eight minutes, so we’re going to finish with this.

Speaker 1 | 33:20.585

Network infrastructure is part of the solution that you’re going to have to go execute to solve those business strategy problems. But I like a quote. I’m a big fan of quotes, okay? And, you know, Peter Drucker, everybody knows Peter Drucker. And one of his famous quotes was, okay, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Speaker 0 | 33:42.363

I actually had a podcast named that.

Speaker 1 | 33:45.606

And my problem or issue with that is, is if you go into any organization, and you’re trying to change the strategy or develop a new strategy, and you do not address culture, then you don’t have a strategy. Okay. I mean, because strategy should not only address breakfast, but lunch and dinner as well, and everything in between, you know, so, you know, you’ve really got to look at organization and culture as part of your strategy. And is that company set up the right way organizationally? Are people getting incentivized to change? Can they work horizontally across boundaries and silos? Or are they getting whipped and saying, this is your P&L. I don’t care what your brother business division is doing. You’re selling these products, these widgets. Who gives a damn what they’re doing, even if they’re across the aisle? That’s broken. You know, and, you know, that’s broken thinking. And if you’re a business owner and you’re, you have four divisions selling four different types of widgets to four different types of customers, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to get vertically disrupted.

Speaker 0 | 34:59.744

I don’t even know if you should even be a CTO or a CIO. I think you should just be like a business founder and just run the whole joint. Okay. Can we just make you like the, you know, the next, I don’t know, Tony Robbins or something, not even this. It has been an absolute pleasure. Very, very, very valuable information. And I really hope this is just very, very, very valuable. And I’m sure everyone out there listening will see the same. So thank you very, very much. And for anyone that wants to get a hold of Bill Genovese, please. Look him up on LinkedIn. Uh, it will, his contact information will be in the, you know, in the, the, um, you’ll be able to find them very easily in the summary of the show content. So, uh, look him up and, uh, you’re available. You just got back from China. So your contract’s up. So, uh, anyone that wants to snatch you up can snatch you up. So I don’t think it’s going to be cheap though. Uh, so it’s, um, you know, any, anyone that wants to get ahold of you, you are available, sir. I thank you so much for being on the show.

Speaker 1 | 36:04.202

No problem. Thanks for having me. It’s been an honor and I’m humbled and very much enjoyed the discussion.