- Welcome to the Shiproom, you're on the air.
You know there are four fruits
in the iconic Fruit of the Loom logo,
and I'm gonna be eating 'em today along with my guest,
the SVP from Fruit of the Loom, Bobby Berry.
So Bowling Green, Kentucky, is not only where
Fruit of the Loom is, but it's also the site of the factory
that has built every single Corvette since 1981.
- Just about every Corvette.
If you go to the Wendy's over by the Corvette plant,
you have to have a Corvette to park
in the first couple spots.
- So is it a Corvette painted on there?
- It's a big sign that says, "Corvettes Only".
- Based on our research, there's not another city in the
world that leads in building underwear and sports cars.
- That's probably true.
- So companies face a lot of challenges when they have a lot
of employees and a lot of locations.
You have both.
It can lead to silos, communication challenges.
What do you do to improve collaboration?
- You're right, a lot of locations globally,
a lot of employees, 230,000 or so.
Just giving them better platforms to have
these conversations about the things that are relevant
in their department, in their region potentially.
- In their world.
When you start to let people connect themselves rather than
kind of forcing hierarchies or forcing these weird siloed
departments things, people want to talk.
People want to collaborate and connect,
so like I said, IT being an enabler, I mean a lot
of times we're breaking down walls.
- One of the things I've been watching for a long time
with Fruit of the Loom is we've worked with you
with Microsoft 365 is, you guys are
a very forward-looking organization.
How do you do that?
- It feels slow at times and then you have these sparks
of just acceleration in different groups within the
organization, adopting tool X, Y, or Z, whatever it may be.
Different teams will kind of latch on to something.
We talk about Power BI.
We've got this gigantic adoption of Power BI.
I've never seen so many people hungry to learn something.
- Data. - Exactly.
That's what it is, it's all about data.
- Data. - Data.
- Power BI. - Business.
- Teams. - Data.
- Exactly.
- You've had a long tenure in the industry.
You've been doing this a long time.
You've had a front row seat to a lot of business jargon,
a lot of business words.
I have these cards here.
We're gonna take these words, we're gonna use 'em
in a sentence.
- Oh boy. - Okay?
The greatest innovation that has accelerated my team's
ability to put new value into the cloud,
is the solution-based flex process inputs.
- That's pretty good.
The product development team requires intermediate content
relevance platforms to be productive.
- Alright, one of the most important aspects of virtual
networking in the cloud is the cloudification
of third party TCO networks.
- Data Center technology evolves into interoperational
VM synergy linkages.
- Wow.
That's a masterpiece right there.
Trademark that one.
- One, two, three.
- Well, that didn't go very far.
- Oh, you know, that's somebody calling us
on the Teams phone.
They must know you're here.
Let's see who's here.
Hey, welcome to the Ship Room with Bobby Berry.
Who is this?
- Hey, hey, it's me.
Roosevelt Hanson.
I'm a local stand-up and I am a big fan
of Fruit of the Loom, Bobby.
I'd love to drop some material on you
because I do the underwear humor.
But I should probably start with some kind
of business questions.
So, you've done a lot of work puttin' together some
really robust cyber security at Fruit of the Loom,
tell me about that.
- You know, we look at kind of a news, right?
And you get scared to death of the challenges
of cyber security, and so we have very robust education
and awareness that we run all of our employees
through training to understand how they can be,
I'll say how they can be manipulated.
You know, whatever it could be.
- No, these attacks are very well engineered.
- Absolutely, and all that attack, like it's all
commoditized now, so anyone can do it at scale.
We just have to keep our employees on their toes.
We love to do fishing campaigns.
It's fun when you catch the people that you shouldn't catch.
That's really fun. - Yeah, yeah.
- But it's also fun too, when you see an organization
that figures it out.
We started, we had some percentage
of individuals who clicked.
- Did you see that going down?
- Did you see it going down?
It's so rewarding that people start to really understand
their role in keeping the company secure.
- Despite all the training that we do,
somebody's gonna fall for this.
And so we have to have, as a community, as an IT
community that understand that we have to have
an assumed breach posture.
Used to be that we all assumed that our walls that we
had built were impenetrable and everything was safe,
but you have to have an assumed breach culture,
then you have to have the capabilities to be able
to identify the breach and act quickly.
And that's where most organizations fall short today.
- Wow, nice.
This is some pretty deep stuff.
How 'bout I bring the room back up with some of my
unique brand of comedy? (laughs)
- I don't know about that, you know, this is a serious show.
- Oh come on, I'll keep it brief.
Get it?
Brief, underwear, zing. (laughs)
- Alright.
You're done.
I read an article where you said you looked around
the industry and you saw all these small competitors
who are taking these big bites out of the market.
And they were transfer changing really fast.
You have these really kind of fast start-ups.
How do you think about technology enables Fruit of the Loom
to respond and compete?
- It's the collaboration side of things.
If you can make it so that people can make those decisions
faster, you start to be able to participate in that really
fast development cycle, product development cycle.
You start to be able to connect to your consumers faster.
It's that whole breaking down the walls, connecting people,
and adjusting the culture to let them know that that's okay,
that's what you're supposed to do.
That's the only way to compete.
It's the platform just enabling collaboration is the key.
We were on prim everything for a long time.
Realized that doesn't scale and it's expensive to do it
that way, and it almost, it's like the definition of silo.
It's like just, I'll put it in a little box in a corner
and kinda keep things that way.
When we invested, a lot of our conversations were about,
this is gonna essentially take all this burden off
of us around managing
- Infrastructure. - Infrastructure.
You know, that's kind of going away.
And really in putting on people's end points,
their work stations, their phone, you know,
whatever device they happen to have, a direct connection
into this backbone of communication that we can create
with the tools that we got from investing in Microsoft.
- Okay, so when you set your sights on improving the
productivity of the organization, how did you go about it?
Designers, accounting, supply teams, I mean,
you've got everything.
- I think we started to identify groups that should be
collaborating more, internally and externally,
and targeted them first.
If you can get them to adopt it, everybody else
kind of looks to them as, oh wow, they can do it,
I know I can do it.
Then it just gets, I'll say, a little easier.
Some of the smaller teams, you get them running
on a platform.
- You were able to work out any kinks that are
in the system, but you get a quick win, then you can scale.
- Yeah, exactly.
- So quick wins.
(ringing)
How do you balance being really hands-on versus letting
your users choose the tools that they wanna use?
- You've always gotta have some guard rails.
We feel like we do a good job of presenting to the business
the types of tools that are really gonna be what they need
to kinda meet their needs.
At the end of the day, whatever makes them productive.
And I think the investments we've made, we have all
the right tools to make them productive.
And there are very few, it's few and far between,
when someone comes up and says I need X, Y, or Z.
Some of it ends up being an education opportunity.
Oh, well, you can do that over here.
- Exactly, exactly.
- Every once in awhile there'll be a who-knows-what app
somewhere that they have to have and take a look at it
and they're right.
Some of these very niche kind of applications
for specific groups, they're 100% correct.
I don't wanna build it.
I'm certainly not gonna run any software to do it,
but if they've got something that's out in the cloud,
hey, let it rip.
- The whole time we've been talkin',
we've also had a machine learning bot.
It's been listening to everything we've been talking about.
So let's develop the 12 most relevant questions
from what our topic has been.
What you see here in front of us,
is we recreated the Fruit of the Loom logo.
You and I are gonna try to finish the platter
of fruit while we answer the questions.
- Oh, this is gonna be fun.
- Okay, we're gonna start the timer now.
(upbeat music)
Question number one.
Neapolitan ice cream, what flavor do you eat first?
- Strawberry.
- You think velcro has a future in underwear?
- Probably more so than a zipper.
- When you get a phone call, is your first thought,
why don't you just text me?
- I don't like talking on the phone.
- Would you cancel work if a snake got loose
in the building?
- A snake?
- What about a goose?
- No.
- If there were budget cuts, which fruit would you cut?
- Currants.
- I actually never had a currant before.
Can a cubicle be haunted?
- No, there aren't any walls.
- You parallel park, or just go somewhere else?
- I usually go somewhere else.
- I think I've had about as much as I can eat today.
So people wanna know more about you and about Fruit of the Loom,
where can they learn more?
- Fruitoftheloom.com, everything about the company,
about what we do is right there.
- You are an amazing leader, and I think
in an amazing brand, in an amazing culture,
and you can eat a lot of fruit.
- Thanks, I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
- I'm Brad Anderson from the Shiproom.
We'll see you the next time.
- We have a turkey.
- What?
- Yeah, man her name is Elvira.
She hangs out at turkey times of the year,
she's all over the campus.
She's got a badge and everything.
- What? - She's a welcome guest.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah.