Speaker 0 | 00:09.706

So to introduce you By the way, do you go by Anthony Officially all the time?

Speaker 1 | 00:15.610

I do, I go by Anthony Sweet,

Speaker 0 | 00:17.752

Anthony There’s a lot of Anthony’s in my Jiu Jitsu class by the way Are you Italian? I’m not We’ve got a lot of Italian

Speaker 1 | 00:28.840

Up to New England. I do run into a lot more Anthony’s up here.

Speaker 0 | 00:33.801

So we have Anthony Wheat on the floor. I mean, on the show, Director of Information Technology, Stratus Technologies, everyone out there you’re listening to, Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And we’re getting into, we could call this the third season, but it’s probably just the second season because I wasn’t really important enough in the first season. But this is kind of a big deal. And I think this is a great, a great. show to start off, I guess the year that we’re going to start, I guess the new, the new year is going to be November 1st. I mean, we’ll try to break this up, you know, have some, some companies do October for their, for their new, uh, new financial year. And, uh, we’re just going to change it up for, uh, to November, but anyways, uh, give me a little bit of a breakdown. Uh, what’s your day-to-day job? What do you do right now? And then we’ll get into it.

Speaker 1 | 01:22.312

Sure. So as you, uh, introduced their director of technology at Stratus, Director of Information Technology at Stratus Technologies. Day to day, I really run or lead the infrastructure team as well as the enterprise applications team for the organization. Everything that comes with that, service desk, all the line of business applications, data center infrastructure, really starting to pick up telecom.

Speaker 0 | 01:55.278

Oh, good. I love that.

Speaker 1 | 01:57.036

cloud-based, you know, Azure, 365, Salesforce, those types of applications and programs as well.

Speaker 0 | 02:05.020

So let’s go back in time. How did this all get started? What was your first computer? What was your first, I don’t know, intimate relationship with technology?

Speaker 1 | 02:15.806

Yes, I grew up, I guess you would say, on a farm in Arkansas, a cotton farm. Really, my family farmed cotton for many, many years, my grandfather. And in Northeast Arkansas. And I really, I didn’t have a computer growing up.

Speaker 0 | 02:32.998

You don’t have that in Arkansas.

Speaker 1 | 02:34.980

Yeah, exactly. You know, and for all my Arkansas people out there, let me go ahead and correct you. Arkansas was a state before Kansas was. So it should be Arkansas and Kansas.

Speaker 0 | 02:45.109

Oh, there we go. There we go. See, now we’re really educating people.

Speaker 1 | 02:51.696

But yeah, I didn’t have a computer growing up. I didn’t really get one until after I joined the military right out of high school, the Navy. And not until I was a couple of years in the Navy did I get my first laptop. But in the Navy, in the military, I did telecommunications and information technology. I wasn’t called IT back then. My job title was radioman, but it encompassed. ADP is what they called it back then, automated data processing. This is the mid-90s.

Speaker 0 | 03:21.625

Radio Man. You know, I should have named this show Radio Man. That would have been a lot cooler. Radio Man. That’s pretty sweet. Well, first of all, how did you get to be Radio Man if you’re from Arkansas? Or saw Arkansas?

Speaker 1 | 03:37.211

Or saw Arkansas? It’s a really short story. When I went to processing and they gave me options for jobs in the military, they offered me… uh, to be a cook. And

Speaker 0 | 03:49.565

I,

Speaker 1 | 03:51.585

I wasn’t ready for that. Um, they offered me operations specialists, which sounded really cool. And it was, uh, basically ship navigation, radars, things like that. And then the last thing they offered me was radio men. And in my head, I immediately thought of, you know, one of these guys in Vietnam with the green huge backpack,

Speaker 0 | 04:11.894

uh, calling in, calling in, uh, yeah, we’ve got to call in a strike. Right. Calling an airstrike.

Speaker 1 | 04:18.753

It was really ship-to-ship, ship-to-satellite communications, telecommunications. And they had just merged in the data processors was the other job that they merged into Radioman at the time, which encompassed, at the time, IT. It wasn’t called IT. It was data processing is what they called it.

Speaker 0 | 04:40.431

So let’s go back. Let’s paint a picture for all these. Let’s paint a picture for all these. I don’t know. privileged people that are listening to the show. This was 1996, if I remember correctly, right?

Speaker 1 | 04:54.159

Yeah, 96.

Speaker 0 | 04:54.860

So 1996, what do we have? What did we have in 1996? I can tell you where I graduated high school in 95. I stayed back in first grade, so I should have probably graduated in 94. But when I graduated high school, I did not have a cell phone. I did have a 486 computer with probably, I don’t even know what the RAM was. Internet was like something that… My friend, like my nerdy friend had like, I remember him bragging about it. I think it was, was it 56 K modem dial up modem? Was it 56 K? Is that right? You know, bragging about that. He was bragging about that. And I’m like, what the heck are we really going to do on the internet anyways? Our messaging boards and like, you know, you know, other nefarious activity. He went on to become a Navy SEAL. And so anyhow, just for, for people out there, like. Listening, if you weren’t around for this era of time, then I just don’t see how you can appreciate anything. This is how I know I’m old now because I’m talking about the olden days, you know, prior to or at the birth of the internet. So what do you guys have as radio man on the ship? So you went straight to get into play with actually like probably the most high tech stuff that would have been available at the time.

Speaker 1 | 06:19.960

Yeah, yeah. My first duty station was a four deployed ship based in Italy. So. My first six years in the Navy, I lived in Italy, which was amazing. But what I remember is maybe one to two years after I had been on board, we got a desktop refresh. And we got Gateway computers and they came in as Pentium 90s and Pentium 133s. And it was the first time anybody had seen a Pentium. So, you know, it was a big deal.

Speaker 0 | 06:47.293

It was a big deal because I just remember Pentium being a big deal. And Gateway was all over the place for anyone that doesn’t remember that. Gateway, the cow.

Speaker 1 | 06:56.837

Cow boxes, yeah. We had a flight deck full of cow boxes.

Speaker 0 | 07:00.358

That’s amazing. I was in the bank the other day, and they was like, did you see all the boxes in the back? We got no computers. I’m thinking in my head, man, there’s an IT guy somewhere that’s going to have to deal with this. I was just trying to imagine what could happen next, but they were like, we got new computers. Okay. I don’t know if that means much anymore, but anyways, you got a bunch of boxes, gateway boxes on the deck of the, what were you on? What kind of ship were you on? Are you even allowed to talk about this as classified? Sure,

Speaker 1 | 07:33.714

yeah. Yeah. She’s a, she’s a reef now down in the Florida area, but it was the USS LaSalle.

Speaker 0 | 07:40.116

It sunk?

Speaker 1 | 07:41.796

Yeah. Yeah. She was, she was used as target practice and became a reef.

Speaker 0 | 07:46.158

That’s awesome.

Speaker 1 | 07:48.478

Originally commissioned in the mid sixties. So by the time I got there in the mid nineties, she was pretty old. But she was a great ship. Sixth Fleet flagship, so the staff for all the Sixth Fleet responsibility was on board. So it was great because with that responsibility, we really got a lot of the latest technology from both communications and IT. We were on par or better in some instances than some of the carriers at the time that had a lot of the more technology advanced. uh, things on board. So it was a good first starting point for me.

Speaker 0 | 08:27.413

How were you guys communicating with the network? What kind of network did you have? Or what was it? Because if you’re a radio man, you had to be doing something. What, what were you actually communicating?

Speaker 1 | 08:36.657

Yeah. I mean, it was ship to ship communications, satellite communications, um, just really for operations and things like that. Um, for, for the Navy, um, our network on board was, if I remember right, it was a hundred meg network, but we weren’t obviously at a gig yet. And when I first got there, we were Novell. We hadn’t moved over to Microsoft yet. And sometime during my time there, we transitioned over to Windows NT 4, not 3.5, but 4. And I think we upgraded to Exchange 5.5 at the time. So, yeah, it was the big deal was all the computers, all the desktops had to go from 2 gig of RAM to 4 gig of RAM to really run NT well. So that was, I remember that being a big deal.

Speaker 0 | 09:26.099

The exchange, I was asking you this the other day too. How many people, if you had to guess, how many people do you think are still on exchange? And why? I guess the question would be why? It must be some kind of heavy lift to upgrade or something like that.

Speaker 1 | 09:43.053

Yeah. If you’re still on premise exchange, there’s most likely a reason, a business reason for that. just because economically it makes too much. cents to go to the cloud from a dollars and cents perspective for 365. So if you’re running today, my bet is it’s really there’s some business driver. It could be a segregated network that doesn’t really have full access to the internet. You know, you’re talking potentially government military, whether that’s, you know, segregated networks or something like that. That’s where I would put my money on. people still running change on premise. But, you know, I’m sure there’s still holdouts that just haven’t, you know, haven’t gotten to the point where the, you know, the leadership of the organization is ready to make that investment into the cloud. You know, and it’s just not something that, that.

Speaker 0 | 10:41.822

Why would they not do it? In other words, is there any reason, if I had to ask you, like, should you be on exchange still? Or like, like, why, why should someone. Like get off it as soon as possible.

Speaker 1 | 10:54.917

It’s such a commodity these days. You know, it’s one of those things, it’s like a toaster almost. You can kind of set it and forget it. It’s much more manageable if you’re going to the cloud. You don’t have to have really the in-depth expertise that you need for an exchange admin on site. Once you move to a 365 or Google Cloud or whatever you may choose, it really turns it into more of a commodity. Sold it. you know, there’s less skillset involved, um, and it’s much easier to learn. So that, that would be my time.

Speaker 0 | 11:29.599

I would imagine just time. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 11:31.399

yeah, for sure. Time.

Speaker 0 | 11:34.280

So let’s fast forward here and let’s get to the meat of this anyways. How, um, you had the experience, right? Uh, clearly you went from high school straight to the Navy, but you do have an MBA.

Speaker 1 | 11:49.624

I do.

Speaker 0 | 11:49.824

Um, So somehow, somewhere in between all of that, that happened. And did the MBA and all that college education for the people out there that, I don’t know, might decide to potentially go a different route, which I have eight kids and I tell them every day, like, don’t do what I did, go to college. And so many people would disagree with that, especially just so many family members, actually. Um, but… Did it help the MBA? Did the college education help?

Speaker 1 | 12:25.236

Yeah. And, you know, that’s a question that comes up a lot in the IT space, especially when you get into higher level leadership positions. You know, do you need the MBA to really be a part of the business and understand the business? And I think it helps from in general business understanding and maybe the lingo and things like that. Is it required? I don’t think so. I don’t, I don’t think it’s required. I think if If you get out there and you make the relationships in the business, you can understand, you can learn what needs to be learned. Without the MBA, I look at it as it’s just another feather in your cap. If you can do it and you have the wherewithal to go through that process to get an MBA or to get that next grad degree.

Speaker 0 | 13:09.814

Okay, so you mentioned the relationships. You said if you can make the relationships. So. So we’ll talk about that for a second. But I guess the question would be, if you can’t make the relationships, does the MBA matter at all?

Speaker 1 | 13:33.560

Yeah, I would say probably not.

Speaker 0 | 13:35.861

Yeah, so one thing is more important than the other. So one’s more important than the other. What’s the deal with the relationships?

Speaker 1 | 13:42.363

So to give you a, I guess I’d call it a catchphrase that I use all the time. Technology is easy. People are hard. And, you know, what I mean by that, I can’t say I’ve ever worked anywhere in IT, in technology, where I was not surrounded by brilliant people, you know, really smart, ingenious people with initiative. And, you know, they can figure things out. You know, I don’t have to be the smartest guy in the room. I have people around me that are smart. I just have to learn how to work with them. You know, I have to learn what motivates and drives them. And why is the hard thing?

Speaker 0 | 14:20.978

I guess the question would be is why?

Speaker 1 | 14:25.181

Well, I mean, to, to build those connections and relationships, you know, one of the things that I’ve also,

Speaker 0 | 14:30.444

and the reason why I’m asking why is because it used to hide out in the server closet. Yeah. That’s, you know, so why now? Like, why is it so important now?

Speaker 1 | 14:41.032

You know, the question always comes up about a seat at the table. You know, that’s, that’s really big in it over the last 10 years. you know, getting a seat at the table, being a big part of the business. And you’re not going to do that without making and building relationships across the business. Uh, that’s just, that’s a, that’s a part of it. That’s, it’s a requirement. And that’s why I say that is more important to me than the MBA. Um, you know, you have to be able to meet people on their terms. Um, and, and you have to be able to have those relationships. And without that, you’re, you’re not going to go as far as you really could with the business and technology.

Speaker 0 | 15:18.497

So give me one of the hardest people examples you can think of. So technology is easy, fix it. There’s a, there’s a solution to everything, but. Give me a hard example. The first thing that pops into your head that was like, this is difficult and this is how we dealt with it.

Speaker 1 | 15:36.276

Yeah, just more generic. People that aren’t as necessarily technology savvy, tech savvy, being able to meet them where they are and lead them to water, so to speak. And if you can’t make those connections to do that, You know, there’s some people that don’t want to change. They like what they do. They like the systems and the processes they have. And even though you could potentially make it 10 to 100 times better, it scares them, I think, in some instances. And they don’t want to make that change. And so having that rapport and getting them to understand, you know, what the benefits for them are, I think that’s really critical. And that’s how you make it to that next step.

Speaker 0 | 16:23.311

I’m trying to think if there’s an example in my life like that where I’m like scared to make the change. Yeah. I’m trying to like put myself in their shoes, you know, like, like I get it. I can see my, my father, for example, is 85. Like I can see that from his perspective, but his, it’s just a matter of just memory and utilizing these plethora of devices that are out there and how it throws his life out of whack on a daily basis. Yeah. maybe simplifying it for people. So how do you bridge that gap? Right. How do you bridge the gap between, uh, I guess, you know, you’re saying people are tough. So yeah, sometimes there’s like, no, it’s, it’s just what you’re dealing with. So what are we doing to bridge the gap?

Speaker 1 | 17:10.747

Yeah. And you know, you can’t please everybody all the time. We know that. Um, but one thing that I think is big is dropping the ego, you know, um, a lot of people in it. As I said earlier, you know, they’re smart. They’re really intelligent people. And sometimes they can come across like that. And, you know, dropping the ego, being able to meet somebody where they’re at, you know, that’s a big part of it.

Speaker 0 | 17:35.644

I think it’s a huge part of it. And actually, now that I’m thinking about it, a lot of the IT guys that I know that are in leadership positions are not really that good at IT. They’re not. They’re not. They’ve got their power players filling in different gaps and holes. But what they’re really good at doing is just being a nice guy or girl or just being a nice person that connects with people and understands how to connect the dots. And when there’s, you know, put out fires, when there’s fires going in, at least, you know, you know, delegate tasks and do different things. It’s really more of like it’s kind of like more of like a leadership role now for them, so to speak.

Speaker 1 | 18:14.773

And there’s something to say, too, for the art of making it their idea. If you want something done that somebody else has to take action on, you make it their idea and you’re that much closer to getting it done. And let them take the credit. That’s got me a long way as well. Again, a lot of it’s about ego. But find a way to have them feel like the idea is theirs or they have ownership in it. And if you can get them to that level, then, you know. you’re always more excited about your own idea than somebody else’s. Right. And so you’ll, you’ll push harder for that.

Speaker 0 | 18:56.161

So for the new, for the new people out there looking to grow fast in it, the, what are they going to do to focus on leadership? I guess maybe there’s not enough, like we were talking before, there’s not enough emphasis. in the IT world on leadership in general, was there anything that you’ve done or read or experienced that helped a lot? Maybe just being in the Navy probably helped a lot.

Speaker 1 | 19:23.261

Yeah. You know, there’s, I would say the military is a, it’s probably looking back. That’s a, that’s a big part of my background from a leadership perspective. I cringe when I hear people called managers and not leaders because you, you manage things and you manage processes, but you lead people. And, and you’re not the only one. You know, I don’t see that translated a lot in, you know, I can say outside of the military. It obviously does. But I come across more times where people are managers. You know, they’re looked at as managers and I don’t like to view people that way that are in leadership positions. Um, because being a leadership position is about the staff that work with you and your peers that are also in leadership positions. Um,

Speaker 0 | 20:07.147

so it director is better than it manager from a title standpoint, but we can form a new title. What would the new title be? It leader. It doesn’t make sense. You don’t call the CEO, the leader either.

Speaker 1 | 20:20.236

Right. Right.

Speaker 0 | 20:21.196

It leadership department, I guess, director. A bunch of people in there like staring like at you, like, what is that? What do I do? So, so there’s not enough focus on leadership. Don’t like when people are called managers. What, what, what do we do? What do, how do we fix the problem? How do we fix broken?

Speaker 1 | 20:48.682

You know, in listening to some of your shows, mentorship is talked about a lot. And Mentorship is, I think, a big part of that. But there’s some things that I think people have some disillusions about with that. Formal mentorships are, from my experience, rare, where you actually formally say to somebody, hey, I want you to be my mentor and to be your mentee. It’s really finding those people that you admire or you see that are really doing things the way that you would like. them to be done or where you would like to get to at some point and then just picking their brain on things you know it doesn’t have to be formal um and and really just try to gain nuggets from them just through questions that you ask and how would you handle this situation you know and and ask them questions and um that can be a mentor for you and they don’t even know it but you’re gaining a lot out of that experience and we should do a crazy boot camp too you

Speaker 0 | 21:53.812

Live with a Navy SEAL for 30 days, but it’s like IT. Live with an IT Navy SEAL for 30 days and get rid of the arrogance. What’s wrong with you? Jump in this frozen pond and see how arrogant you are now. Is there something to do? Can that even be broken? Can that be broken? How about this? Imagine this. Imagine you give a project to a team of IT people, five IT people, okay? And it’s a simple project. Maybe not that simple, but it’s a project that maybe should take two weeks, and it takes instead three months. Why do you think it took three months?

Speaker 1 | 22:45.909

Communication. Communication and collaboration is a big part of that. Every organization I’ve ever worked at, I would say one of the top three biggest challenges or issues in that organization is communication, internal communication. Just getting the vision passed all the way down from the CEO or the senior leader all the way down to that frontline worker. Getting that passed through is always the most difficult thing.

Speaker 0 | 23:14.037

From working with tons of IT directors. and tons of organizations. Here’s something that I’ve seen very interesting that pops up. When you have IT managers, not IT leaders, what I find is, do we say paralyzation by analyzation or analyzation or whatever that, you know that saying, you know, like paralysis by overanalysis or something like this. With them, it’s more like paralysis by… over-testing analysis, testing again, over-analysis, checking with every single person on the team, making sure it’s perfect, making sure that not a single end user is going to have a problem with it, being worried about anyone having a problem with it, being worried about maybe upper management complaining about something. How do the tickets get entered in the system? Is this the right flow? Literally, like a project that… would normally go to like maybe HR or something like this, but it’s really an IT project, right? But somehow HR made the decision on it real quick, right? Because it was like about numbers and dollars and doesn’t do this. And some salesperson sold them something and it was like a shadow IT thing happened, right? And then IT just had to deal with it. So it got implemented right away. And IT was like, why is, you know, they’re all mad, right? So then we work in an organization, it’s an IT organization. So it flows through the proper departments, but it hits, Five to six very smart IT people. And I want to say arrogant, but like it’s arrogant, but they’re like smart. They don’t want to make a mistake, but they wouldn’t call it arrogance. And it’s not really arrogance. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like the engineering tunnel mindset. You ever run into that?

Speaker 1 | 24:58.658

I have. Yeah. I mean, you have to be able to make some calculated risks. And well,

Speaker 0 | 25:02.899

I think that might get in the way with a lot of these. I think that might get in the way with a lot of people. It’s like, I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to make a calculated risk or I don’t know how to communicate change fast. I just know how to execute.

Speaker 1 | 25:15.545

Yeah. And you know, it’s one of the things you just said. It reminded me of indecision. Right. Indecision is a decision to do nothing. A lot of people get caught.

Speaker 0 | 25:26.711

It’s a decision to do a lot more work to make yet not another decision.

Speaker 1 | 25:33.736

Right. You got to be ready to make a decision and we’re not always going to get it right. Learn from your mistakes. These are cliches, right? But I mean, it’s kind of the brass tacks also. Fell up, fell fast, whatever you want to say.

Speaker 0 | 25:49.307

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 25:50.848

You know, make that decision.

Speaker 0 | 25:54.198

I’ve seen people go down and make a decision and then take forever to implement it, only for it to be the wrong decision also, on top of it all, to take six months to find out we made the wrong decision. Well, we just got to put it in now. I’ve seen some interesting technology can be so complicated and so widespread. And then if you add in personalities as well. I’m just wondering if there’s like, really, if there’s a mentor. But are there some maybe themes? Are there some maybe like, you know, paradigm shifts, so to speak, things like aha moments, anything that you’ve had or things that would be helpful to people out there listening to break maybe a certain mindset that they don’t even know is a handicap. They might not even know. It’s just, we’ve always done it this way. So I don’t even know to say other, I don’t know how to do it other ways because I’ve always thought this way. I’ve always been this way.

Speaker 1 | 26:50.901

Yeah. I mean. resistance to change. Right. Um,

Speaker 0 | 26:54.343

but they might not even be resistant. You know what I mean? Like a lot of times we don’t even know what’s wrong with ourselves. Like how do you, if you don’t even know that there’s a problem, how do you know?

Speaker 1 | 27:02.466

Well, and where I’ve come across that it’s because, you know, people become stagnant. Um, you have to be a lifelong learner in it. You have to be, you have to make the decision that I’m always going to learn something. You know, every day you got to have something that you can say that you learned.

Speaker 0 | 27:20.274

Boom, done. What do we need to learn? So what should they learn that they, because they might just pick up another like programming book. Like seriously, like what? Give me some ideas here. And you had mentioned a bunch of things not to do last time. Like maybe we hit on some of the things not to do and then, okay, so I don’t do that, but what should I pick up and do to read?

Speaker 1 | 27:40.531

The first thing they need to do is subscribe to your podcast and listen to all the people that have already come.

Speaker 0 | 27:48.138

Okay, good. I like that one. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 27:51.379

No, seriously. I mean, I’ve gotten quite a few things out of, out of, you know, some of the…

Speaker 0 | 27:55.401

Give me one. I got, I got to know. I got to know because I just want to know that I’m not doing this like perilously forever for no reason whatsoever. So please tell me.

Speaker 1 | 28:04.604

I came across this podcast and I listened to like four or five, binge listened to a few of them. Yeah. And I think I posted on LinkedIn, you know, for all my contacts, hey, check this out. This is really good. But, um, you know… Trying to think, last time we talked, there was one specific thing that stuck out to me. And I’m trying to recall what that was. Oh, I remember what it was. You know, you can’t go into an organization, expect them to trust you if you don’t get the basics right. You know, if you can’t meet SLAs on your service desk, like people’s things are broken and you can’t get them fixed in a timely manner and it’s impacting the work. You know, you got to be able to do the basics really good. And when you get that. nailed down, then you start gaining trust and you can start reaching out to other parts of the organization to build more and more relationships. But if you don’t do the basics, if you don’t do the foundational stuff good, really well, it’s going to hold you back. So, you know, for example, that’s something that I picked out that I thought was, and I can’t remember who it was that, which guest was that said that, but I thought it stuck out to Hmm.

Speaker 0 | 29:13.901

Got to get the basics right. Smooth flowing help desk. Hopefully no problems at all. Lower the tickets, SLAs. Yes. Right. People know who you are. That should be one. Who’s our IT guy? You know how many companies I’ve worked for? I have no clue. I have no clue who was sending out my laptop. I have no clue who replaced my phone. Absolutely no clue at all. Nor did I care. And I did not care if I dropped my computer out of the car and it… broke haphazardly, I was an important person that needed a new computer right away. I was like the worst end user that someone could have. I’m admitting it right now. Because admitting it is like part of like the recovery process. I was a horrible end user. I was the worst. Shadow IT, check. Yep, absolutely. Dual factor authentication, no way. I don’t even, no way. I would never do that. I would be the guy to ask to shut it off if I was forced to do it. I’d actually put up a sting for that. Numerous problems. I’m a problematic end user.

Speaker 1 | 30:19.150

And I’m a big fan of audio books. You know, over the last year and a half, we really haven’t had that much commute, so to speak, due to COVID. But prior to that, you know, if you have a 30 minutes an hour commute one way or even if that’s round trip, you can go through a lot of audio books. Just going back and forth to work in your car.

Speaker 0 | 30:40.299

Audio books.

Speaker 1 | 30:41.499

You can learn a lot.

Speaker 0 | 30:43.360

It changed my life. I’ll be honest with you. I do not. listen to music. I only listen to audio. I’ve learned other languages. Spreaker. I mean, not, um, what’s wrong with Pimsleur, man. Pimsleur. I’m a horrible language student. Horrible. Pimsleur, that thing, that is the way to learn a language in three months. Within three months, you can learn any language in three months. General speaking, general, like regular, go to the country, speak, get, get, get around. Um, So what was it? The Phoenix Project. Have you listened to that yet?

Speaker 1 | 31:19.160

Yes.

Speaker 0 | 31:19.700

Yeah. So that’s like huge.

Speaker 1 | 31:21.862

You know, that, that, that, see what’s good about that, that book then, you know, that leads you on to other books, right? So the goal, which is about the theory of constraints, I, you know, that came out of the Phoenix Project because a lot of that’s based on the theory of constraints with, you know, continuous integration, continuous development integration and DevOps in general. So. Listening to these books or podcasts even, right? Instead of music or instead of just driving.

Speaker 0 | 31:54.103

Oh, we waste so much time, man. It’s crazy.

Speaker 1 | 31:56.424

Yeah, it is.

Speaker 0 | 31:57.825

From Twitter to whatever you kind of zone out with and just burn your brain out. If we really were focused, I’m really, I love the, oh man, what was it? My brain just stopped, so nevermind. But we waste a ton of time.

Speaker 1 | 32:15.074

We do. And that’s an easy way to reclaim time and learn while you’re doing it. I mean, what else are you going to, you’re sitting in your car, you’re driving, you know, um, what else are you going to do? You can learn during that time. So it’s, that’s something that I think has helped me a lot. Uh, audio books. I like to read, but I, I listened to audio books more than anything because it’s an easy way to consume the material.

Speaker 0 | 32:38.320

It’s an easy way to review because most of knowledge retention, most of knowledge retention is review. is reviewing. And most people, when you read a book, you never pick up that book again. You never reread a book. You might take some notes on the side. You know what I mean? You might do that. But most of retention of knowledge goes through like review and not just rereading it because you’re not going to retain it that way. It comes from like taking notes on the side, then reviewing your notes and doing all that stuff. An audio book you can listen to over and over and over again.

Speaker 1 | 33:08.355

Right. I have many audio books that I listen to over and over.

Speaker 0 | 33:12.642

Uh, especially if it’s like a skill based thing, you know?

Speaker 1 | 33:15.543

Yeah. And a lot of times I get something different. You know, when I get an audio book, I say to myself, let me get two to three things out of this book. The first time I listened to it, if I can get two to three things that stick with me, I’m happy that, you know, that was a success.

Speaker 0 | 33:28.030

Yeah. Yeah. The, you actually gave me from our talks last time, a summary, um, we kind of summarized the whole piece of, well, first of all, why. why is all of this important, right? Like, why is all of this important to a business to begin with? Listening, I don’t know, learning to communicate with people, whatever it is, like new leader, looking at IT as a leadership. I mean, we’ve been speaking kind of like, I don’t know, it might be kind of like vague from now, kind of vagaries, but what’s the real purpose? Like, if someone doesn’t do this, what’s going to happen? If you’re in IT and you don’t learn how to lead and communicate with people and you don’t learn, I don’t know, if you don’t get the basics right, which is just kind of step one, like, okay, you’re hired. For people that are kind of like growing up in IT and want to speed up the process, is it necessarily go get another certification? Is it necessarily do all these things to try and like further your brain? Like the human being can only do so much, can only learn, can only, you can’t specialize in everything. anything. So what should you specialize in? And if it’s, you want to actually grow in IT, then it would be, you know, leadership. If you want to still kind of just be a I think you mentioned worker bee before, then be a worker bee and be ready to jump from company to company and make whatever your base salary is a year and clock in and clock out every day and be happy with that. Or maybe you want more. And so why is the leadership piece important? At the top of it, what’s behind all of this? What’s the most important thing? If we pull back the curtain, no one gets through to seated wizard. What’s the real… What’s the wizard? What levers is he moving and who is it and why?

Speaker 1 | 35:24.009

Yeah, I think there’s two things that you need to look at there. One is at an IT director level, senior manager, you know, even in some places, VP level, your middle management, your mid-level management in the organization. And to me, that is a really key spot for businesses because you are in the middle. You have one foot in strategy and one foot in tactics and you’re that bridge. So you can be in the place where you understand the vision and the mission really well because you’re in a position where you have that available to you to understand that from the senior executive leadership. But then you also, you know, you’re working daily with your frontline workers and with your, you know, your frontline leader. And so you are that gap that can take that vision, that strategy. And. be able to apply it down to the frontline workers. I think that’s one really big thing.

Speaker 0 | 36:23.445

I’ve never had someone in my life say that middle management is important and you just made them like the hero. It’s true, man. Because when I think about it, when I think about the people that made the biggest difference in my life, like kind of growing up, like when I started at this like Cisco startup company, it was Walter Domler. who looked at me and basically said, Phil, I’m just middle management. But the guy had such an effect on my life and we became like the top team in the company. And it was really because of him. And he might not even been the best at what he did, but he was the best at like coddling people. He was a coddler. I’m going to tag Walter Domler in this. He’s going to laugh. And he’s still, he was just, he’s just like. Like a good dude. I don’t know how else to say it. He was just like, you know, he cared about everybody. No one disliked him. He was just that person that was like a communicator, right? And I worked hard for him. And he was good at able, he was able to like, you know, communicate from the top down and like kind of maybe get me in control from time to time. But I think that’s a good middle management is the one that has the view to the CEO. Has that basically probably sits in on meetings, gets like some metrics, whatever, EBITDA. If no one knows what EBITDA is out there, you should probably figure that one out if you want to be in any type of IT leadership position. Absolutely. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, just figure that out. And if you don’t know how to spell it, Google it, try a few different things. EBITDA, duh, EBITDA. EBITDA.

Speaker 1 | 38:17.896

CPA.

Speaker 0 | 38:18.016

I may have a couple of those out of order. Earnings before I got to go whatever. Interest depreciation, whatever. You know what I mean? So know that, but why is the CEO care about that? He’s trying to drive that. Right? And why do the people at the front line, they don’t care. They just want to get me paid, man. Okay, well, you’ll get paid if you can do this. And you can understand why you’re doing what you’re doing because it’s, here’s the greater goal. Why would an IT director, I mean, sorry, why would an IT manager care?

Speaker 1 | 39:04.638

You know,

Speaker 0 | 39:04.938

that’s… Maybe that’s the wrong question. What should an IT manager do? But yeah, why should he care? He should care selfishly because he’s going to lose a job. He’s going to get replaced by somebody else. But there’s an IT manager out listening to this show. He’s going to listen to this show. What should he do?

Speaker 1 | 39:27.133

That’s the million-dollar question, right? You know, going back to that, you know, bridging the gap, IT has a good visibility across the whole company.

Speaker 0 | 39:42.864

How about this? What did you do? Here’s the better question. What do you do? Cause I know, you know, just sit and I know, you know, just hide, shut the server room door and hide. Yeah. What do you do?

Speaker 1 | 39:57.664

Make those around me better. You know, that, that’s one thing.

Speaker 0 | 40:00.606

Give me an example. Think of one. The last time you made some, I don’t know, you’ve had to have made someone cry. Everyone makes someone cry. I’ve made people cry.

Speaker 1 | 40:07.612

Put people in a position.

Speaker 0 | 40:12.696

Right.

Speaker 1 | 40:13.317

So you may have somebody on your team. Uh, you’re working on a project. And. um, that maybe they’re junior and you give them the opportunity to, to be a lead on that project.

Speaker 0 | 40:25.446

Okay. And you start, and here’s what happens. You start to see them go down the three month hole and it needs to get done in two weeks. What do you do? Do you coach them? What do you do?

Speaker 1 | 40:33.391

Yeah, absolutely. And, and where I was going is, you know, you may have somebody that comes to you with a plan for this project. That’s 70% of what maybe you would do, right? Maybe it’s, it’s 70% of your plan. But you let them run with that because it gives them ownership. And then you help and guide them through that other 30% because the majority of that is theirs. They own it. And when people have ownership of things, they take more account into what they’re doing.

Speaker 0 | 41:05.032

So if you’re really good at delegating, and I’m asking selfishly here because I have eight children, I’m the king delegator. I am the king delegator. If mom is gone, it’s like… You go help him brush his teeth. You go give that one a bath. Empty the dishwasher. Sweep that up. I’m like the king delegator. And my wife likes to do, and this is just a metaphor. Obviously, I would be like that at work too. But it was like, you know, some of it’s much more complicated, especially when you’re trying to teach someone else to delegate and not do the job themselves. That’s a tough thing.

Speaker 1 | 41:42.539

Absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 41:43.640

I don’t know the solution to that. I’m hoping you have the answer. How do you teach someone to delegate? How do you teach someone to let go? It’s like you don’t have to be a perfectionist. If you’re a perfectionist, you’re screwed. That’s got to be the answer.

Speaker 1 | 42:02.019

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 42:02.860

Because my wife wants the clothes folded this way. If I let them do the laundry, it won’t get folded this way. Who cares? You won’t be doing laundry anymore. How about that? Think about this. You won’t be doing laundry. Who cares how it gets folded or teach them how to fold it or you teach them how to fold it, but you got to be okay with them. Maybe trying, maybe figuring it out a new way. Cause it doesn’t all have to be done the same way.

Speaker 1 | 42:29.235

Right. You don’t have all the answers. That’s, that’s why I say, run with it, run with their 70%, right. And, and see what that, what that gives you. And then you feel, but you help fill in the gaps and that’s the coaching mentoring. Um,

Speaker 0 | 42:42.405

okay.

Speaker 1 | 42:42.705

Those are big words. Those are big words that people get scared of. And it doesn’t have, again.

Speaker 0 | 42:47.728

You’re going to coach me right now. I’m scared.

Speaker 1 | 42:54.413

So let’s do it together.

Speaker 0 | 42:56.955

Show me what you’re… That’s a leader.

Speaker 1 | 42:59.917

Show me what your next steps are.

Speaker 0 | 43:02.559

That’s a leader. I’m scared. I’m scared to go into battle. All right, follow me.

Speaker 1 | 43:10.145

Yeah, let’s do it together.

Speaker 0 | 43:13.214

It’s deep. Simple, but deep. So simple. Remember what about Bob? It’s so simple. Baby steps, baby steps.

Speaker 1 | 43:21.681

Simple, but not easy a lot of the times, right?

Speaker 0 | 43:23.842

No, it’s not easy because everyone’s scared and people don’t want to do it. And they’re impatient and they, they delegate something because they don’t want to do it. Delegate maybe the stuff that you like doing. That’s another thing too. That’s. Interesting. Sometimes I do things and people are like, you’re, the other thing is, is like, you might do something that you’re really good at and people tell you you’re really good at it. And you’re like, stop, this is easy. This is like stupid stuff, but they don’t, but you don’t, it’s easy to you, but it might not be easy to them. So that might be the thing that you need to like teach people as well. Like, what do you do? That’s really easy. Obviously you’re in the, you’re in the, the more of the IT leadership role. So you must be doing something that other people didn’t do.

Speaker 1 | 44:13.438

Yeah. You know, if I had to look back at that, I did a lot. And we touched on this briefly earlier. I watched. Right. And I did most of the most of the things I learned was what not to do. And I said that earlier. I’ve there. And for those listening that are working right now with that bad leader, that manager, you know, learn from that. Learn what not to do. You know, don’t just. don’t just throw your hands up and go so you know the great resignation right go somewhere else learn Learn what not to do. Get as much as you can out of the situation before you move on. And then apply that.

Speaker 0 | 44:55.706

Wow, I’m thinking of the worst boss I ever had right now. That was easy to learn what not to do. That was like really easy. That was the simple lesson. Don’t harass people. Don’t get fired for sexual harassment. It was like, you know, don’t put people down. Don’t say that you’re better than everyone else. You know, it’s got to…

Speaker 1 | 45:18.498

And learning what not to do, that’s not intuitive. You know, that’s something you have to actively say, oh, is what they’re doing, I would never do that, you know.

Speaker 0 | 45:27.325

How could I do it? How could I do it better?

Speaker 1 | 45:29.226

Put that in your Rolodex, right? Put it in your Rolodex. If people still today know what a Rolodex is, put it in your Rolodex and use that in the future when you come across a similar situation.

Speaker 0 | 45:41.637

I’m going to leave, well, I’ll leave one thing. Well, I’ll ask you for one final thing here, but… Before we do that, one of the things, and I’m just sharing this because for me, it’s such a huge deal and I don’t do it enough. And I think the more I say it, maybe the more I’ll do it. And that is just thank people. Just have a reminder on the mirror every day. Just call one person and thank them. Just tell your kids what they do good. Because when you’re a driver and you’re a leader, you’re always looking at how to improve. So everyone hears from you. what they need to do better. It’s like almost all the time. Whereas it’s not necessarily like you get so much more from like encouraging people, telling them to do more of that. That was awesome. That was amazing. You know, when we think about the people that we really liked to working for, that we’d go to battle for, that we’d jump in front of a moving car for, right? They’re always the most patient, calm, like they’re teaching, they’re sacrificing their time. They’re sacrificing their time for you. They’re always calm. You’re like, you look at them and you’re like, how do you not blow up at that person? Like, you know, and you ask them and they say something inside like, well, believe me, inside my head I was. And you’re like, well, you’re a better guy than me. You know, that to me is, it’s just when I think, when I think, when I can think of like the really good leaders also is to model after them. Right. So if you had one final statement for anyone out there listening to the show. Um, what is it, you know, what’s the one thing that you’ve been just dying to like, like you would just like, if you had to like drive this one thing home, what would it be?

Speaker 1 | 47:27.129

The, one of the most important things I’ve learned in my career that helps and helps a business, helps a business succeed in its mission. If they really take advantage of it is IT touches every part of the business, right? Technology drives businesses today. There’s, there’s probably not a lot. that you’re going to see anybody do at work that doesn’t require some kind of technology. Because IT touches every part of the business, they have a hand in every business process, for the most part, either through facilitating that with technology or just in general being a part of that process. So what really people need to understand is IT has that vision across the organization. of all the business processes. And they’re the ones that can figure things out and really understand how to bridge the gaps, how to build efficiencies. You know, that’s the one thing that I think I’ve learned most is, you know, IT touches everything and we have the ability to impact everything. So when that, when an organization really understands that and takes hold of that, it can transform a business. And, you know, that’s a… IT buzzword, business transformation, digital transformation. That really can happen because IT understands all aspects of the business in most situations.

Speaker 0 | 48:53.506

I haven’t written an article in a long time. And usually when I do, it’s going to be a letter to my CEO or a message to my CEO. And I forgot about the spell check, the viral spell check problem that you had. Everyone that wants to hear a really good story, because I don’t know if it’s appropriate or not, you know, it’s going to be on LinkedIn. If you want to know, if you want to hear a great viral email story that got sent out to thousands of people on a naval ship that just brought on like 30% women and the viral spellcheck. Wait, what was the word that it was supposed to say? Oh, Pentium. I think you guys can guess on what Pentium got changed to by the spellcheck in the system. and how great all of our new pentiums, but that word got changed and we’ve got a lot of pentiums on board for everybody.

Speaker 1 | 49:52.738

Everybody gets Pentium on their desk.

Speaker 0 | 49:58.223

Spell check, change that one.

Speaker 1 | 49:59.704

So this is, you know, this is the late, mid to late 90s. Pentium wasn’t a dictionary yet. So it was brand new.

Speaker 0 | 50:08.291

So click send. Yeah, there is no, and what would have been really funny is if you put a read receipt on that too. All right. So. The, yeah, it’s going to be a message to my CEO. IT touches every part of the business. It impacts everything. And the last part of that letter to the CEO is going to say, so spend money on us.

Speaker 1 | 50:36.741

I like it.

Speaker 0 | 50:37.502

You know, thank you so much for being on the show. This was outstanding. I really look forward to it. And we’re going to have to get. I really hope people listen to this entire 53 minutes because the real meat of this show is in like the last half hour. So man, best of everything to you in the future. And let me know, you know, I’d love to have you back on the show and we can talk more about this. We should do a show. We should reverse engineer this and do a show to all of the sea levels. You know, we should do a show. We should do a show specifically for. uh, all this, all the C levels that are not in it. That’d be good.

Speaker 1 | 51:20.220

We just, if, if we’ll get them to listen to it, it’d be awesome.

Speaker 0 | 51:23.561

We’ll figure out, we’ll, we’ll somehow, uh, we’ll have to use some kind of, um, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll use an email phishing tactic. We’ll use, we’ll use the best, we’ll find the best email phishing hacker guy on the planet to get them to click on, uh, to click on the email. That’s what we’re going to have to do. what do we call that? Something bait or something clickbait. We’ll have to use some really good clickbait. We’ll find some really good clickbait they’ll listen to the whole show and then we’ll say and you should have never clicked on this to begin with. So that’s why you should also give us more money. So alright Anthony thank you so much.

Speaker 1 | 51:58.281

Thank you Phil for putting this together. It’s a great podcast. I do appreciate it.