(upbeat music)
- All right, well, Duncan,
welcome to "Coffee With Bruce."
- Thank you, Bruce.
Nice to be here.
- So, what I wanted to do today was talk a little bit
about our respective experiences in leadership.
And I've been thinking a lot lately
about the idea of technical leadership,
which is something I've done in a bunch of different roles
over the years.
But I think the almost four years
that I had working for you leading really quite a large
technical organization
was one of the really formative experiences in my career.
So that's what I wanted to talk about today.
The opportunity that you offered
was really something quite far outside my comfort zone.
And so for me,
it was both a chance to move somewhere that I wanted to move
and do something that would give me a growth opportunity
at a point in my career
where I'd done a lot of different things,
but I'd never actually led a really big team.
And actually, one of the things that stood out to me
was the idea that I would ultimately be leading a team
of almost 600 people.
And up until that point,
the biggest thing I'd led was a group of seven people.
And so, I remember saying to you,
"Do you really want somebody who's only got the amount
of experience that I have leading such a large team?"
So, what were your thoughts when we had that discussion?
- I must say that I found it quite surprising
'cause obviously having come up
through different leadership roles
and had very large teams,
that concept of - you've got to this point of your career
and actually never had big teams.
I guess what I was confident about is people follow leaders
if you can provide structure,
coaching, guidance, and help them.
And so what you did have was incredible clarity
around technology and where it was going,
and confidence to stand up on stage
and stand in front of a team,
stand in front of customers, and hold your own.
So then the difference was really around,
so how do you scale that without killing you in the process?
- (laughs) Yeah, this is kind of getting
to one of the things I wanted to touch on
where I think that technical leadership,
it combines a couple of different things
and you took a very strong position
that your technical leader was going to be both the leader
of the SE organization
and the kind of technical spokesperson
for your bigger organization.
So combining the role of CTO,
which is sometimes referred to as chief talking officer,
with the role of SE leader,
but this idea that you combine those together,
that was a distinctive view that you took,
it was actually different
than some of the other sales leaders across VMware.
Well, how did you kind of come to that idea
that the person who leads the organization
should also be the technical spokesperson?
- I think the key one is,
it's around being connected to customers
and then around the difference the team can make.
If you have the two separate,
you run the risk of actually having management of a team
different from leadership for the team.
And so I'm actually at a fairly simple concept,
the leader having subject matter expertise
is part of how you help people decide what's important,
where to focus, and you have more of a closed loop around,
is it making an impact?
It's not just about talking about it,
actually, you have to make it a reality
and it has to deliver value.
And then you have to bring the whole team.
You never bring the whole team,
but you have to bring most of the team on that journey.
So it's less theoretical.
- Yeah, and I think for me,
that was one of the things that I've found really valuable
about being in the sales organization,
is that you've got a very practical set of things
you have to get done and that ultimately,
your job is to deliver revenue to the company.
And you've got this whole technical pre-sales organization
that is, you're trying to get them marching
in a common direction to lead the customers,
to want to buy our products.
But the presales people are very much not salespeople,
they are technical people, they love technology,
and they're trying to help the customers understand
what the technology can do for them.
And I think one of the things I found really interesting
was kind of: what's your metric of success
for a technical presales organization?
Because if you asked somebody
who's delivering a revenue number,
they would be tempted to say,
well, as long as we hit the revenue number, it's all good,
whereas I think in a technical presales organization,
that's probably not the right metric.
So what do you think of in terms of how you measure success
for a technical presales team?
- Well, I think it comes back to, first off,
around sustained organization success
is more than making a sale.
It's actually about people using it.
Particularly in software,
the only value comes when it's actually in use.
But that means if you -
to have sustained success and not just make a quarter,
you actually need to worry about the things leading into it.
And the things leading into it are actually around,
do we understand the problem?
And what we're proposing,
does it solve the customer's issue?
And have that well before
we actually get to the sales process.
And so then it means, it's a really critical role
around the technical team has,
in that engagement with customers,
to truly go that next layer, understand what's going on.
Can we help?
Can we help them accelerate?
And so there is a partnership,
but it's just different roles at different stages
of the process.
- Yeah, and I think there's a real sense
of a different timescale too, right?
That the salespeople can be measured mostly
on what did you do this quarter?
But the technical presales team is really thinking about,
will the customer want to keep buying from us
two years from now?
And how are we positioning things
in such a way that two years from now,
they will believe that we have the right solutions for them.
And clearly, if you optimize for the short term,
you can easily cannibalize
that kind of long-term relationship.
So one of the things I really enjoyed in my time
working for you was your level of experience
in leading people,
was, I think at the very top level
in people I've worked with over my career,
I think you're particularly experienced
around building and managing diverse teams,
partly because you've spent so much of your career in Asia.
How do you take your kind of passion around diversity
and apply it to technical teams?
- I think the first thing
is recognizing that as a leader,
you're only made up of the sum of the people
that work for you,
and everything you invest in them
helps them produce a better result,
is how you end up with, in aggregate, a better result.
And so, there's some really simple things,
diverse teams actually are what drive innovation and growth.
And so the reason I'm passionate
about changing the diversity,
is it brings a different lens
and you end up with a different view of the problem.
And when you end up with a different view
and you can have an open debate about it,
it actually creates a better solution.
And so, part of it then is investing in people,
keep providing input, coaching, and guidance
that is over time.
If you've got that continual relationship and engagement,
you then have the ability to say,
well, what if we invest here?
What if we change the diversity of our team?
And we really want more, particularly women
coming into the team to improve our ability to innovate.
- Yeah, and one of the things I really liked seeing was,
as we worked really hard on trying
to build a more diverse team,
it caused us to think a bit differently
about what kind of roles we would hire people out of.
And so we saw some really good examples of,
you just don't go and hire somebody
who's already been an SE at another cloud company.
You go and actually look for people
who've done consulting roles
or roles that are a bit different.
And so you're not just changing the gender balance,
you're changing the set of experiences that people have,
which leads to this better sense
of how you approach the customer
and how you bring a complete view
of what the customer's issues are.
And so to me,
a big experience in terms of how I thought about diversity
was at one of the leadership summits,
hearing the analysis of data
that really showed from an engineering point of view
how more diverse teams produce better results.
And so it was great to actually see us
putting that into practice.
- Yeah, and I think what, as I watched you as a leader
who went from - holy crap, I'm talking on 600 people,
to be the leader, learning that it's about how you engage
and how you get alignment.
And actually people want help.
They want coaching, they want guidance.
And if you can drive alignment,
in some ways, it gets easier,
but then you realize how many more things
you've still got to work on.
And it's a living organism, so it's never fixed.
It's always the market's changing,
the people are changing,
and you're always trying to drive that alignment,
but that's where the pleasure comes from,
'cause when you see it start to happen
and you've recruited some different people
and they bring a different point of view,
you can feel it going forward.
- Yeah, and honestly, I think for me,
one of the reasons why I'm so happy,
I took that role was because I got to see the development
of people over a long period of time.
And I think that's one of the most satisfying things
about being a leader.
Perfect.