[Car Wheels Squealing]
- [Brad] It's lunch time and this is
" Brad Anderson's Lunch Break".
[Light, Pleasant Music]
I get invited to attend tech events
all the time in Las Vegas, and whenever I can,
I like to make the quick trip from Redman
and meet with other tech leaders
and learn about what they're doing.
[Light, Pleasant Music]
This week, I hit the rode with Don Jones,
a regular speaker at tech conferences all over the world,
a widely read author, and a passionate tech educator.
[Light, Pleasant Music]
Alright, easy does it.
Get into this big old boat, here.
- [Don] Oh my goodness, what a car!
How are you, Brad?
Good to see you.
- Doing awesome!
I'd say welcome to Vegas but you live here.
- I do live here.
[Light, Pleasant Music]
- With a last name of "Jones", you're kind of like
"Anderson", there's a lot of us, right?
- Yeah
- Alright, we went on Linked In and tried to find you.
We tried to find "Don Jones".
We found a number of "Don Jones'"
- I'm sure
- [Brad] So we're gonna play a game here
to figure out which one is you.
- [Don] Okay, got it.
- Do you own a Bed and Breakfast in Ohio?
- I do not.
- Alright, take that one off.
Did you used to manage the factory where they
make Fritos in Memphis?
- No, but how cool would that be?
- Yep, there is a Don Jones that did that.
Were you, for six months, in 1984,
manager of a Chuckie Cheese?
- Nope!
- [Brad] Are you in charge of marketing for coupons.com?
- [Don] No.
- [Brad] These are all "Don Jones'".
Are you the CEO of candylady.com?
- No.
- Did you get a degree in Theater from
Northern Michigan University?
- I got no degree at all.
[Light, Pleasant Music]
- Now you get pulled into consult
and advise companies around the globe.
- Yeah, yep.
- What are some of the most common blockers
that you're seeing that is preventing people
from really embracing these new trends,
cloud, mobility, etc, etc...
What are the common blockers that you're seeing
and what do you tell people?
What do you advise people?
- Cultural, it's always cultural.
It's people who are trying to run a modern IT environment
the same way we ran it when we had NetWare and NT.
It's this 20 year old management philosophy
and it's a tough conversation with people to tell them,
"You're having an IT mid-life crisis.
You need to get out of your rut
and you can continue managing things this way
but you can't have the nice new things that are coming out
because they're just not built for it."
It's like trying to drive this car
without putting your foot on the gas.
That's how you make it go forward.
- So how do you tell people to change the culture?
- You have to make an active decision.
The executive, the board, everybody has to sit down
and say "enough is enough, we're gonna move the ball,
we're gonna push forward and we're gonna actively change
who we are and what we do as an IT organization".
And if you don't, it's almost like a 12 step program,
if you don't admit that you have a problem,
and you don't actively say,
"this is what we're going to do",
well, then you're just gonna meander along
in the same rut you've been in.
- So deliberate, you have to have a sponsor,
you have to have someone who's pushing it.
Someone's gotta go lead the change.
- They do, absolutely and sometimes the CIO,
the CEO, the CTO, they're not the right person.
Sometimes the best advocate is somebody who's in
the middle of it every single day.
They need that support though.
- That's super good advice that people who are gonna be
watching this, which is, you can actually be the
advocate, you can be the thing that actually causes
and enables your organization to really propel forward.
- [Don] Yeah, absolutely, you can.
[Light, Pleasant Music]
- So we'll talk about the space that I'm passionate about,
that I live in, productivity and mobility and security.
What are the trends that you see there
and what advice do you give people in that space?
- It's again, our 20 year old philosophy tells us that
we want everyone on the same device, with the same
application, at the same time in the same way
and that's a dead concept.
We all know everybody wants their email
on all of their devices.
They want their Word and Excel on their machines,
on their terms and that gives people
a lot of security concerns but I feel that our skill,
as an IT industry, has to go beyond "We know how to
make the computers come on".
It has to be "We can make this work,
no matter what the situation as we know how to do it,
or we can find out" and if that means, our whole approach
to security has been completely wrong for this world,
then we have to be brave enough to ditch it
and do the right thing.
The answer to the business can't ever be "no".
That's never the right answer.
- I agree.
- It has to be "gimme a minute, let me figure it out".
- Sure.
[Light Hearted Music]
- What is the strangest experience you've ever had from
any of the actors off of "Star Trek: The Next Generation"?
[Laughter]
- Someone's been on my blog.
When I was in high school, one of the ways I made extra
money was helping to run local "Star Trek" Conferences
and right in the first season of
"Star Trek The Next Generation", there was a character,
Tasha Yar, who is played by Denise Crosby,
and she came out and we're sitting down, she's waiting
to go up on stage and do her thing and they were doing
a charity auction and the auctioneer was just
auctioning off little snippets of cloth and stuff like that,
and these are going for 50 or 60 bucks
and I was escorting Denise around the show
and she turns to me and says, "Why is this happening?"
I said, "Well, they're probably costumers
and they want the cloth sample for an exact match
but it's also charity, believe me a lock of hair
you could get a couple hundred bucks."
She stands up on stage and she says,
"So before I start, what am I bid for?"
and my Walkie Talkie starts going off,
"What's happening, what's happening?"
I'm like, "I don't know, I hope it's legal."
and she auctioned off her underwear
and she got like 350 bucks for a pair of underwear.
- Great charity.
[Laughter]
- So the next year, same conference, we hired
Michael Dorn, who played Worf.
His agent called and said "Michael wants to know
if he needs to bring extra boxers".
I'm like, "great, great, thanks, now we're 'those people'".
- [Brad] Next time on " Brad Anderson's Lunch Break",
What's the hardest part of building a fighter jet?
Are the instructions like the instructions
you get from IKEA?
- Nearly, you would be surprised.
Ya might fail, but you have the ability to
quickly un-fail as well.
Fail fast or don't fail at all, but recover quickly.
[Light, Pleasant Music]