Gerald Kane - Author of The Technology Fallacy

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Gerald Kane, the author of The Technology Fallacy, and we discuss the biggest misconceptions about digital transformation, using the scientific method to drive innovation, and how to identify opportunities in a rapidly changing environment. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) Jerry.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:00:35) Hey, how are you doing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Fantastic. Look at that Zoom background. Where is that?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:00:40) Yeah, man. That is actually Boston College. It is actually pretty close to the actual view out my office window, so it feels like I'm at work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:51) So you guys still aren't back yet then?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:00:53) Nope. Well, I do believe, you know, it's summer, so even if we were back we wouldn't be back. And I think some people are allowed on campus, but I'm just staying away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:04) Yeah, schools, it's very localized how they're reopening and what they're doing. Some of the K through 12 schools here are talking about two days a week or—it just seems like it hasn't solidified across the nation. Has your college released any information about that?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:01:22) Yeah, we're coming back in the fall. They're doing—you know, we get updates about every week on what's happening. A lot of classes are gonna be at about half size in person classes. Some of the large lecture classes are gonna go online, but students will be coming back on campus.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:01:39) They've actually, I think, leased a hotel for the foreseeable future to make sure we can have more dorm space. So they're taking a lot of precautions, and they're doing as good of a job as anybody can do. And, you know, here in Massachusetts we've been pretty fortunate that the government has handled things fairly well, and we were one of the big surges, but now we're managing. So we'll see. Where are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:12) I'm down in Florida.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:02:13) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:14) Yep. And things are going up and down, you know, back and forth.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:02:18) Are what?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:18) They're up and down, back and forth. So we'll see how things progress, but I don't know. I'm excited. I get to talk to great people like you every day.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:02:27) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:28) And so for me, this is, you know, it's pretty exciting to be able to connect through technology. And it's just amazing because we're bouncing light through fiber around the globe.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:02:45) I've been teaching this stuff for twenty years now and I still geek out on all that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:50) What are your primary subjects that you teach?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:02:53) So I'm in the business school and it's information systems, so how technology is changing business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:58) All right. So I love your book. That's why—that's how I found you. I found you because I was like, I need new books to read. I searched by the best-rated books on Amazon for categories I was interested in, and then I read your book, and I was like, this is good. I know you wrote it with a group of people too, right?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:03:15) Yep. My three co-authors are all Deloitte consultants. So it was a five-year initiative that we did, you know, sponsored by Deloitte and MIT Sloan Management Review. And it was a lot of fun.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:03:30) We're actually working on book number two. What's been fascinating to me is how many of the insights from The Technology Fallacy are actually applicable to the COVID situation. And that's sort of what we're investigating in the book—why does this stuff work so well in responding to COVID? And the sort of the thesis we're working on is they're both disruption. So digital disruption, which is what we dealt with in The Technology Fallacy, is what we call chronic disruption.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:04:04) Just like a chronic health condition, it happens over time. It's a little slower to recognize. And we're calling COVID acute disruption. You know, comes in, hits fast, hits hard organizations—and people—but mostly organizations. And so many of the same things, many of the lessons still apply. And so we're digging into why that is and which ones do apply and which ones don't.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:04:30) So I've had about a dozen interviews over the last month or so with executives, many of whom were featured in The Technology Fallacy—sort of follow up with them. And it's been just really interesting to hear companies' journeys as they've tried to react and respond.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:48) How did the book project come up at the beginning?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:04:51) The original, the first one?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:53) Yeah.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:04:55) So I was recruited by Sloan Management Review to be the academic lead for this research initiative that Deloitte was sponsoring. And after five years of doing that—and we released a report every year, they're freely available on the SMR website, most of it's also in the book—and we just realized at the end of that five years that there was a larger story that wasn't getting told in the individual reports.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:05:22) And so we decided to go ahead and write a book out of it. And it was, you know, it was a really far more enjoyable experience than I thought it was gonna be, and I learned a ton.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:33) Do your students geek out about the books too? Do they read it? Is that part of their class?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:05:37) I have not—you know, I feel a little sheepish assigning my own stuff to them. But, yeah, I shouldn't. But it's, you know, then I can't tell them.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:05:48) So I just tell them all the stories, and they pretend like they just happened to me. And so I find it more fun to just sort of drop the stories in class and have them not know where I got them from. The course I teach is actually pretty interesting. It's called—and it's even getting more interesting now—it's called Tech Trek.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:06:07) So I teach them for about six weeks of classroom time, and then we take them—historically have taken them—either to San Francisco or New York and visited tech companies or the tech side of large legacy companies and how they're trying to adapt. And that's fascinating because I get to—you know, in San Francisco we get about 25 to 30 companies in a week. In New York, it's about 20 to 25 over three days, and we get to talk—Facebook, Google, Amazon, and then like Warby Parker, Madison Reed, Fanatics, the sportswear company. And just hearing these leaders talk is really fascinating. And then, you know, obviously we're having to pivot in the COVID time, and so we're figuring out how to offer it virtually.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:06:54) And I think that actually has the potential to be even better because we're limited to the number of students we can bring when we travel. But when we go virtual, we can bring these amazing executives in to talk about what they know, and we can cram a bunch of students in there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:12) So do your students typically already have business experience, or are they bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, haven't worked in—

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:07:18) Yep. Most of them are all undergrads. And in fact, we typically—and so it is a competitively admitted class since there's a limited number of students that can be added—and we typically favor sophomores and juniors as opposed to seniors. And the reason for doing that is we really say, look, this is intended to be a life-changing experience, or at least an education-changing experience. And, you know, if you're a senior, you already have a job, you already have a plan, you already have a major, it can't have that impact. Whereas, we get them as a sophomore, and we could open their eyes to sort of the possibility of tech and entrepreneurship and digital business, and it really has the chance to change their trajectory of what they study. And that's what we try to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:06) What sort of—I'm really interested because you get to talk to a lot of people. And I like that because once I got to that point in my life where I started talking to a lot of people, you just get these amazing—it's like we're little AI algorithms. We pick up on these patterns and we see things. And so I was curious to know, you know, all these different companies you get to talk to, they're talking about digital transformation, technology, people, process, all of this stuff. But what are some of the biggest misinterpretations that you see as a trend? Do you see any?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:08:37) Oh, of course. I mean, so that's the whole point of The Technology Fallacy, right? You know, the title, which interestingly enough we came up with last after we had written the book—so we never actually explained what it means in the book.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:08:50) And so the technology fallacy is this mistaken belief that just because your business challenges are caused by digital technology, that the solution necessarily involves digital technology. And in fact, what we find and we illustrate in the book is that many of the more effective solutions are actually people-oriented. And still, when I'm on podcasts like this and having conversations with people, you know, we'll talk about the importance of culture and mindset and employee skill sets and managers and leadership traits and organizational traits, and they still wanna go back to, okay, well, what about a cloud strategy? It's just like, no.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:09:29) That's not what we're talking about here. It's how do you get your organization in a place where you can respond regardless of the technology? Now cloud is important, and we're finding that in COVID, but you don't start the conversation there. You start the conversation with how do we change the organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:47) Yeah. I mean, that brings me to my next thought I had when I was consuming all of your content—this concept of all about the people and just general clichés, how they work in life. And what I've—and so I've been thinking deeply about them and trying to wrap my mind around it. And the best thing I've got so far is they become clichés because they're true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:12) But then it's boring. And then you say it so much, it becomes meaningless, and it's just the things your parents said. And I almost feel like it's this infinite loop we go through as a species where the next generation—there's gotta be some use for it. And the best use I've come up with is by discovering those lessons on their own, they discover them and they become theirs with their new words. That's the best thing I can come up with.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:10:40) Well, one of my colleagues—I'm actually a, I still am a Methodist minister in my previous career before I became a college professor. But now my appointment is as a college professor. But one of my colleagues used to say, it's like going to church—one of my business school colleagues. It's like going to church. You don't really learn anything new when you go, but you reinforce, you're reminded of the things that are important. And, you know, as I've given this talk now, you know, literally around the world, I've talked to some really interesting groups of people. The one question that comes up a lot is how is this new? And my response is, well, in some senses, it's not. I'm just shocked at how much people forget in the face of a shiny new object, you know, what's really important.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:11:27) And you can't—oh, we need to be cloud. We need to be AI. We need to be blockchain. We need to, you know, whatever the latest gizmo and gadget is. And we've—and we forget the blocking and tackling sometimes that, you know, the technology doesn't matter as much as getting your employees on board, changing their mindset, realizing what's possible, et cetera, et cetera.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:11:49) But now what we've seen with COVID is lots of companies—it's been like a wake-up call for a lot of companies, and we've seen like years' worth of digital transformation take place in the matter of a couple of months because, frankly, they haven't had any choice. And, you know, the real question is going to be what changes forever and what goes back to the old way when all this is said and done, whenever that is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:14) Yeah. Last night, I was checking out the Delta and JetBlue stock because they are so far under their five year where it's been. And a lot of the other stocks that I had in my portfolio, they came back, right? And they're growing. But those still haven't come back much at all. They're still pretty far under their fair value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:37) And so I was just looking at that, you know, I just—I mean, I feel like it's the mail all over again. People think that the US Postal Service, they think that the Internet's gonna crush it, but in fact, it amplifies it. And I just have this feeling that I don't think—I think this is going to give people—if it pushes them all at home, then they're just probably going to take more travel time and be more movement-oriented for lack of a better term because they have that freedom in space and they don't wanna be—more migratory, right? And that would actually increase travel.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:13:13) Yeah. Oh, I think the—the question—I am by no means a stock analyst, so take a grain of salt. You know, I think what the question is gonna be when. You know, I have no doubt that travel will come back. Will it be different? That's a good question. But how long is it gonna take? You know, if we have a vaccine early 2021, then I think it comes back sooner. If we never get a vaccine, it could be a long time before that normal travel comes back, and nobody knows. And then the question is, can the airline survive long enough, you know, to get to that place, or, you know, what's gonna happen? And so those are just open questions that I don't think anybody really knows the answer to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:55) Yeah. I agree. I'm definitely not a stock analyst, but I just have my portfolio, and I do the best I can.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:14:01) I prefer not to look at my portfolio, thank you very much. Just I just leave eyes closed and trust my financial adviser. So I let him do all the painful looking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:14) So I actually have a recommendation for you for someone that I think you would really, really like as far as their thoughts on leadership and mindset. His name is Joe Campbell. He's the CTO over at T Systems. T Systems is a huge conglomerate, but one of the brands that most people know is T-Mobile.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:14:35) Okay. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:36) Yeah. So just the way that he talks about digital transformation—and he takes the things that are truths, you know, core truths—but he says them in unique ways. And he's just, you know, every once in a while, you get one of those individuals. It's like, oh, that person's on point. And for some reason, I was looking at your notes today and reading about you, and I was like, you know what? I should tell him about Joe Campbell's episode because that would be an interesting connection to make.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:15:00) Yeah. And if you could make an introduction, that'd be great. We actually interviewed somebody from T-Mobile way back in the day in our book research, probably like year one or two. And so they were doing some really interesting stuff, and I'd be loved to catch up and see what they're doing now and how they're responding to the current environment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:19) Do you get to do any consulting? Like, do you ever get to work with a company through a completed project?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:15:26) Yes and no. So, you know, let's face it. My Deloitte colleagues, the reason they funded the book is to sell consulting. You know? And big projects are—you know, I'm just a one-man shop.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:15:40) So I do work with companies, first as speaking engagements. And what's interesting is I had a bunch of stuff set up for March, April, May of this year, and even into June. All of it got canceled. But I would say 80% of it pivoted to some form of online session.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:16:02) And actually, early June, I did a session for a company in Latin America, a company in India, and a company in the US, not where I live, over the course of three days. And I physically wouldn't have been able to do all that, and I could be at home with my family for dinner. That would have been physically impossible before. So speaking is my number one thing. I have also worked with small teams, sort of helping them do some planning, as well as with leadership of organizations, sort of ongoing continuing education. Because I think one of the things that our book showed—one of the fascinating findings—was when we asked respondents, does your organization need new or better leadership to compete in a digital world?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:16:54) And we ranked companies on this maturity scale. And even over 50% of the most mature companies still said they needed more or better leadership. And what the difference was, was those maturing companies were doing something about it. So I do a lot of continuing education with executives so that they can have a digital literacy and sort of approach the digital world with some sort of working knowledge. I often say it's easier for me to teach an executive the tech knowledge they need than it is to teach the tech employees or tech leaders the business knowledge and the leadership knowledge they need.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:17:34) So that's tough. So I do a lot of that because they do need to get their skill set updated. And if they rely only on consultants, you know, the consultants are always trying to sell them something. So I'm often sort of on the company side when dealing with consultants. In fact, one large retailer had brought me in to sort of help negotiate between the company and the consulting firm to figure out what the best projects were, to sort of be a trusted advisor.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:17:59) That's a long way to say yes, but not a lot of hands-on projects.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:04) So you really enjoy the way you get to spend your time?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:18:09) Oh, absolutely. I mean, I have the best job in the world. You know, college professor—a lot of people don't really know what the job's about. It's fifteen years of slog as you're trying to publish or perish and get all your credentials.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:18:25) And then once you have tenure, you know, there's this image of college professors. It's like, okay, once you get tenure, you're going to go work on your golf game or you're going to check out. But nobody—that's a strong word. Most of the people aren't going to survive the fifteen-year slog to get there if all they want to do is check out.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:18:46) Most of my colleagues are actually quite passionate about the areas they're interested in. And once we're up and running and once you have that tenure, it's like I'm free to go investigate and understand and research things that I find interesting and bring them back to my students. And what a great gift. And my wife actually asked me, when do I plan to retire? And I said, why would I retire?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:19:10) My job is what people retire to do. And so it's just an amazing experience, and I'm really grateful for it. And I really see it as a gift that I worked hard for. Let's face it, I worked hard for it. But now that I have, I really want to make good use of it.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:19:27) And really, I feel like I have a responsibility to make good use of it. And I love writing the books and talking to executives because, you know, I can get myself in a big data set or in a lab and sort of do hardcore academic stuff, which is important as well. But I really enjoy working with executives that are like, how can we move the organization forward into this brave new world of digital, and how can we convince our employees that they can do it too? Now COVID's doing a lot of that job for me. So now it's more like, okay.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:19:55) Now that you're inspired and need to do it, now let's figure out what it is we need to do and how do we get up to speed and what are best practices, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I geek out on this stuff, and I just find it interesting, fascinating, and fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:09) Yes, yes. And by the way, you do have the responsibility. If you realize that you have the capabilities and that you're in a situation to do something and improve and push humanity forward with the gifts that you have, then you do have the responsibility. I like the way you talk. It makes me feel like you have a strong understanding of individual ownership and personal development.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:20:32) Absolutely. And then when I can work with college sophomores and help them sort of chart the direction of their lives and can have an impact on that, I mean, what a great, rewarding role that I'm in. And I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:47) I'll share with you a little bit about stuff that I experienced that maybe most people won't talk about.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:20:52) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:53) So I just like to be as open as possible. So I'm very into the leadership stuff because of the podcast and just my entire life. I consume it all. And then, obviously, humans have normal rhythms of up and down. And what I started to notice is I would lack patience or ability to deploy the skills that I knew or was aware of or that I learned when I wasn't taking care of myself or had the correct energy to do so. And then that was the pattern I realized.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:26) Realized, you know, why am I doing this or why am I behaving this way—not in line with my self-image? And I realized, well, you know, maybe I'm not eating enough or maybe I'm not sleeping enough or whatever it is. And so then I'll take a step back, take care of myself, get myself back to recharged, and then I'll be in a better position. Do you ever notice yourself going through those cycles? How do you handle that?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:21:53) Oh yeah. So, you know, I told you I was a Methodist minister in a previous life. And one of the first lessons we learned—I was actually thinking about this the other day for some unknown reason I won't go into. But one of the first lessons we learned is the way you keep yourself out of trouble as a minister is to take care of yourself first because it can just suck you down. And if you're not feeling good about yourself, whether it's self-esteem, whether it's sleeping, whether it's exercise, you know, you are going to be susceptible to making bad decisions.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:22:26) And, lord knows, I've had colleagues, you know, make bad decisions in a trusted role. And you just can't let yourself—you have to take care of yourself so that doesn't happen, and that's the best way to do that. And I think it does apply. I get eight hours of sleep most nights. Most people think I'm crazy. I think they're crazy.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:22:45) You know, I've got too much to do not to get eight hours of sleep a night, because I just don't have that mental sharpness and focus. My purchase of the year was our Peloton bike, you know, in January. So before all this COVID stuff got locked down, I bit the bullet. I really did it for my family, not expecting that I would be a major user of it. And when I'm at home, I'm probably on it five to six days a week.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:23:15) And it's made a huge difference in my health and my weight and how I feel, et cetera, et cetera. So I absolutely agree with that sort of holistic, well-rounded lifestyle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:27) Yeah. Fitness has had the largest impact on me. I started tracking things that I just wasn't—once I hit 30, I was like, all right, I don't have time to waste anymore. Let's get real about life.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:23:38) Just wait. It goes downhill from there, buddy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:42) So I started tracking stuff and I started improving my sleep intentionally, you know, buying a sound machine and eye mask, trying to figure out how to improve my sleep and then tracking, like, okay, I implement this behavior or this routine and how much benefit does it bring me? And if it brings me enough benefit, I keep it. If it doesn't, I let it go. And so I found that going to bed at the same time was the biggest indicator for me, and I had read that through different sleep content I had consumed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:13) You can vary in your wake up because your workouts might be more intense, they said, but going to bed at the exact same time is the most important thing. And so—

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:24:23) Maybe I will have to give that a shot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:25) Oh, it's hard. I promise you, it's hard. Yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:28) It is. Well, I think doing anything consistently over a long period of time is difficult.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:24:33) Sure. It's a lot easier now when we're all locked down, though.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:38) It is, but my three-year-old started staying up late.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:24:43) Oh, boy. See, my kids have always been good sleepers. You know, this summer has been the first time, I think, that they've regularly stayed up past nine. I mean, that may be a little bit of an exaggeration, but they definitely have always been early to bed, early to rise, which is great. I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:59) How old are your kids?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:25:01) Their birthdays are coming up next week. They're born two years and two days apart. And one is turning 13 and one is turning 16. Wait, yes. No, 13 and 15.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:13) I get mine wrong all the time, especially when you're counting the months.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:25:16) Well, especially when it's transitioning and sort of in my head, they're already 13 and 15. And so then when I take—it's like, oh, there's a birthday coming up, so they're going to bump that up. But no, I'd already pre-bumped it up in my head.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:30) What type of tech or what type of career paths, problems are they interested in solving?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:25:36) My daughter is very into theater, musical theater, and actually is quite a good musician. We'll see if that—I've tried to convince her that she's going to get to do better music if she has a day job and does music on the side. And I've certainly known a number of professional musicians who've done that, who've been, you know, X day job, and then it gives them the freedom to take only the best sort of musical gigs or freedom to do that for free or not charge because you get to perform in a great opportunity. My son, I have brainwashed into—his response is, I don't know. The job I'm going to have hasn't been invented yet.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:26:34) And so I've tried to convince him that we had—this is a lesson of the book, and this is something I believe firmly—that particularly in a time of change, lifelong learning is the right approach. And, you know, many people are going to have multiple careers. And when I counsel my students, I really love Boston College. I love its attitude towards formation of the whole student. I think there's a reason I've been there for fifteen years. But one of the times when I talk to the students where I think BC gets the whole Jesuit Catholic thing wrong is they sort of insist on this vocational calling that, you know, you just got to find the right path for you and the right way.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:27:03) And I try to undo some of that because I don't know if there ever is one right path. You know, there are a lot of different junctures in your career journey and what you want to do. You don't want to be aimless and say, you know, I don't know what I want to do ever. But I think it's also important to keep your mind open to when the right opportunities come up that you can really sort of take advantage of it and jump on those opportunities.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:27:27) I was sort of inspired by a church member of mine when I was in the large church in Atlanta, who was the CEO of an exercise company. And he said to me when I was 30, just be sure you're doing what you want to do when you're 40 because nobody will take you seriously before then anyway. And I'm not sure that's the right age, but the point is it sort of gives you a little bit of freedom to sort of figure things out over time. And in fact, I got tenure at BC the year I turned 40, and I wrote him a note and I said that, you know, I'm doing what I want to do when I'm 40. So, you know, victory.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:06) No, huge victory. And yeah, I think you're right too because there's so much flexibility in the maturity of humans, like biologically, that we really—it's like I'm just trying to articulate thoughts that I haven't articulated before. But it's like we have different standards for different age groups of having your life together. And definitely around 40, whatever you've created a reputation in is when you have to get serious because you only have, you know, fifteen, twenty years of solid income-earning potential according to traditional metrics.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:43) And you have to—they're also your highest earning years, technically. So you just really, if you already have a foundation to build upon, then you're in a much better position.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:28:53) Absolutely. And I also think we need to think about careers in terms of skill sets, and you can pivot those skill sets to different settings. And you want to develop those skill sets that allow you the greatest flexibility because who knows what, you know, we don't know what the next eighteen months are going to bring, let alone the next fifteen to twenty years. I mean, if you look fifteen to twenty years ago, the iPhone didn't exist. Airbnb didn't exist.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:29:18) Uber didn't exist. Data and analytics was just sort of at the beginning stages. And so think—I mean, the world has—there was no such thing or just scratching the surface of cloud computing. You know, the world has radically changed in the last fifteen years. And I think the next fifteen are going to be even more radical, you know, whether it's climate, whether it's COVID, whether it's tech.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:29:40) And the only way to really be successful is be able to be adaptable and to be able to learn. And I do think we're in a what I would call the golden age of education because, you know, my son in lockdown has taught himself Python. He's in seventh grade, just because he's like, well, I'm bored, so I might as well do something with it. I expected him to be just playing Xbox all day, every day. And once we said that wasn't an option, he actually turned out pretty productive and doing some interesting stuff.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:30:11) So, you know, all these opportunities happen, and it's our job to just sort of identify them and take advantage of them when they drop in our lap and understand—be able to analyze them to know what the good opportunities are and what ones you should pass on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:27) I have been noticing a trend in the engineering field with newer engineers. And to your point, one of the things that I've been seeing happen, and I'm pretty excited about it, is people are detaching—I guess the analogy would be, before if you have a toolbox, the person thinks that they're the screwdriver. Right? And they're like, I am the screwdriver. And now they think that they're the person using the toolbox.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:53) And because people would be infatuated with this specific technology, they'd be like, I am a Java programmer, Java—and then it's like, if you can abstract that out and show them the reason why business exists—because it brings value to an economy, and so money exchanges for that value. And so the job is efficiency to improve and, you know, broaden how much value you're bringing. And then these tools are just a means to get there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:20) And I think one person I had on as a guest, can't remember who it was, but they said it beautifully. They said something, and Jake might chime in here with a message if he can remember it. But it was something along the lines of, like, I don't play with tools. I build houses or something like that. But the sentiment, and I butchered it, so that's okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:40) But the sentiment was that they're interested in the house. You know, they're not interested in the specific tool because that's the byproduct. That's what you deliver to the marketplace. And I've noticed that people are becoming more comfortable with this mindset transition of let's all get together and say, what's the value we're going to bring first?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:00) How are we going, and then what tool sets can we leverage

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:32:03) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:03) in order to get there.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:32:05) And we cover that in the book too, because if the company or a manager just says, okay, we need to be an AI or we need a cloud strategy, and they can't answer why and what the business value is there, then, you know, you push back. Because if you're just doing it because everybody else is doing it, you don't understand what that tool is going to be, what you're going to be using it for. Now, you don't always understand in advance, but unless you sort of have a sense of what problem you're trying to solve with it, it's just going to be a shiny new toy that doesn't really help you build a house or a digital organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:39) Do you know anyone, because lately I've been thinking a lot about approaching new markets and products and strategies around that. Do you have anyone in your life that is the expert you look to when analyzing? Like, if I was asking you, hey, we're going to enter a new market as a business, and we're going to analyze, you know, three potential new product lines or three potential markets to attack. Do you have anyone that is really skilled in talking about that?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:33:07) It's a good question. You know, because I study it. I don't do it. And so, you know, I'm more my group is more, okay, I've got this new idea.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:33:20) Tell me why it sucks so I can make it better. So those are the people that I tend to have in my life because, you know, I'm not thinking about markets as much as I'm thinking about concepts, ideas, understanding hypotheses, research ideas, insights. So of a slightly different nature, but yeah, I've got a set of colleagues, and I always approach them by tell me why you don't like this. Because everybody in their desire for social desirability and to please people will always hit the highlights and the good parts about it, and you don't need that. You need people to poke holes in your idea. And if you don't ask them specifically, they won't do it.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:34:09) You know, I was talking to a speaker I admire quite a bit. I was happy to be on a panel with her. And first time I'd ever met her, and I asked to have a call with her afterwards just for some guidance and advice. And I, you know, I asked her. It was like, okay.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:34:26) Here's the insight advice. And then I said, okay, you've seen me speak. What do I need to improve on? And she had two or three really good answers that were legitimate. And it's nice to hear those things because your friends rarely tell you what you suck at, and the directions you shouldn't go. And so finding that group of people, whether it's new markets or whether it's sort of how to battle test your ideas, I think you do need those people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:53) Absolutely. Because people don't want to hurt you. Like, a lot of people don't. They want to be liked, and they want to avoid conflict, and they'll just, you know, keep quiet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:05) If we're talking about clichés from earlier, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. Right. Remember that from being, yeah. And so it's to get good feedback. That's why, like, in my life, I always have the certain people who I know will be, like, just brutally honest because that's just who they are. And so when I have things, I'm like, okay, all of these people will cheerlead me no matter what I'm doing. They're going to be like, it's great. Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:30) But these people will be critical of it, and then I kind of, you know, balance everything out. But to your point about product development, one of the things that I found with this guy, Joe Kinsella, that I thought was pretty interesting, he built this large company and sold it to VMware. And he was talking about testing new markets, and he had said something along the lines of that he had a couple ideas and he ran, like, advertising for them through social media networks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:58) And then he identified, like, which idea got the best,

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:36:02) Traction?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:03) Yeah. The best traction. And then he pursued that and ended up building a very large company. Have you ever heard of that before?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:36:09) I have not. I think that's an excellent idea other than you risk pissing people off who want your product, but as a sort of market testing the idea before you build the company. You know, and that's one thing we see with entrepreneurs is they're figuring out their business as they go. What's interesting is by coming back year after year to the same place, like San Francisco or New York, we end up visiting with the same groups of people over and over again. And we see some people as they move careers to a new company.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:36:41) One of my favorite visits used to be the CEO at One Kings Lane. That is a furniture company. And now he's the CEO at Fanatics, the sportswear company. And it's interesting to see that transition. And then it's interesting to see companies grow or not.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:36:56) So two years ago, we visited two, you know, on-demand work companies, so labor markets for different types of employees. And if you had told, if I walked out of those offices, I would have bet one company was going to thrive and the other company was going to die. When we came back two years later, it was exactly the opposite. And so it's oftentimes hard to know in advance until you just are trying it. And many of these companies don't know it until they've tried a couple of different things and they hit on that magic thing, and they don't know it entirely in advance.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:37:36) I don't think you can be totally not have a vision for where you want to go. But a great example is a BC company called WePay. Oh, I know that. And they thought, yeah. So they're, he actually, Bill and Rich were never my students, but they were at BC when I, my first year as a professor.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:37:57) And we visited with them in, really sharp guys. And they pivoted a number of different times until they found that right sort of niche. I think they thought they were going to be Venmo, and they ended up being sort of the back-end processing for, I think it was Kickstarter was the first client that they developed the back end for it. Now run the back-end payments for a number of different websites and, of course, acquired by JPMorgan Chase for $400 million estimated. So that's a good success.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:38:28) I think they're the most valuable company to ever come out of Y Combinator, you know, as far as an acquisition goes, the most valuable acquisition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:38) Yeah. I interviewed one of the cofounders right after the acquisition, right after the JPMorgan acquisition. Yeah. Rich. Yeah.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:38:45) Rich. I love Rich. He's such a great guy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:48) Yes. I'm a big fan of when I get to talk to the executive leaders at companies, understanding how they think and how they make decisions through conversations gives you direct insight to the business.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:39:00) Oh, yeah. And then it would be interesting if you could talk to Bill because they're very different in terms of mindset. Both are important. You know, they both recognize what each other brings to the table, but they're just entirely different. Yeah.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:39:14) You know, it's funny. I've been doing a lot of podcasts, and part of me is like, man, I would really love, I should start doing that. Dude, you should. 100%. Yes.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:39:22) But the problem is, so in some senses, I do it. I'm just not allowed to share it because, so when I interview people, I get these fascinating insights, but then I have to promise them that I won't share anything until, like, they vetted it with everybody. So I do have the conversations, and the outlet's just a little bit different. And so I'm not sure I'm that interesting to do this week after week after week. I could talk about my stuff readily, but, you know, prompting people to talk about their stuff, I'm just not sure I'm as good at it.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:39:55) But maybe I'll try it sometime.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:56) Well, I'm trying to keep it fresh. I mean, we've done upwards of 400 episodes. And, yeah.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:40:03) And it started, we've been sitting here talking for 45 minutes, and it doesn't seem like, you know, it certainly hasn't dragged. It was just a conversation, but you're good at it. So

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:13) Thank you. I enjoy. Well, by the way, I'll tell you how you came about. So I was looking at the past couple years of the podcast and the growth and everything, and I was excited. But I felt like the conversations were, you know, very similar because I was so interested in finding out everyone's leadership style and techniques, and then it started to get a little repetitive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:32) So I said, okay, well, how do I keep this interesting because I really enjoy talking to these people. And so I came up with a couple things. The first thing was a wish list. So I gave my team, we've got about seven people here. I gave my team a wish list. Like, here are these people that I want to talk to, and so you were one of my entries on the wish list because I

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:40:52) Oh, nice. Yeah. And so I'm honored.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:55) I'm honored. I'm so glad you came on.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:40:56) I'm just thrilled when people have actually bought and read the book. I mean

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:00) So the wish list was something to keep it interesting. And then I realized that I had all these great conversations, but I don't ever want it to be I just talked to a person and never talked to them again. So then we started, you know, looking at all these past conversations that I've had and developing an upcoming schedule to have guests, like, come repeat on because I want to reconnect with them and see how the past year has been going. And because this is, you know, I got into this, like, I didn't think it would turn into this, I would say, but I definitely knew that it would be an adventure, and it would help propel me forward. But, yeah, I kind of lost my train of thought there. But, yeah.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:41:39) Absolutely. Well, invite me back in a year because I have another book to talk about, and we'll have made, well, it's hard to write about a crisis that you're living through. So it's very much on the fly of what we're coming up with, but it's been fascinating. And I'm sure I'll have some interesting stuff to talk about next year about this time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:00) Yeah. Earlier, you had mentioned something about you did a, there was a survey done, and there were, like, 51% of people said that, you know, they needed better leadership.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:42:10) Better leaders. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:11) Yeah. Better leaders.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:42:12) Well, no. The least category was 50%. So over half of even the best companies said we need new leaders. It goes up to 80 or 90% for less advanced companies. But yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:25) So I want to unpack that a little bit.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:42:28) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:28) And I want to try to get to the root of it. Is the root of it, one idea that'll get the conversation started because it's probably wrong, it'll be fun to shoot down, is that they lack, like, an individual ownership or that they expect too much of leadership. Another idea would be the leadership is just unengaged, uninterested. I'm just trying to really understand. I know there's going to be specific situations for different companies. But any sort of high-level trends that you see?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:42:57) You know, I think there's some of that. I think there's some of the, you know, a lot of the leaders who've gotten the senior positions have five years left in their career, and they are not interested in engaging in digital transformation. You know, they just want to ride out the clock. They want to do their business the way they've always done it, and they don't understand the stuff too. You know?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:43:17) They don't understand how technology is changing their industry. So that is certain, we actually asked that question, and that was something that came up. You know? Why are your leaders bad? And it was like, they just don't care.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:43:28) They are running out the clock. I prefer a more optimistic spin, which is this, it's a really hard problem. I mean, it is a really hard problem to innovate in your company while still keeping the lights on. And how do you do that? And lots of companies try.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:43:45) And then when something like COVID hits, you turn and you only focus on keeping the lights on. Our argument in this new book is now is the time to innovate because there'd never be a greater opportunity to experiment because you have to. And so don't tread water and wait for things to come back the way things used to be. Innovate your way through this. And so I really just think it's, so one of the cool things that innovations of our own research is we asked each year four open-ended, open text questions.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:44:18) Like, we asked how is digital business different than traditional business? And people just wrote in the answer. And we've had about two-thirds of our respondents were outside of the US. About one-third was inside. So we got global responses, lots of different languages.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:44:34) And I had my TAs go through and code all 3,300, 3,500 responses. And the biggest difference on how digital business was different was simply the pace of change. And the need to keep learning is just hard. And so I had this working hypothesis that digitally advanced companies would have better leaders. And that hypothesis was sort of shot down.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:45:01) But digitally advanced companies are helping their leaders get the skills they need to lead into this digital future, and that's what makes a difference. And Carol Dweck has the book Mindset, the Psychology of Success or something like that. And, you know, we really rely on this growth mindset, not just at the individual level, but also at the organizational level that you can do this. And we have one finding in the book, which just screams growth mindset. We asked respondents if their company was going to be in a stronger or weaker position going forward as a result of digital trends and then why.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:45:37) The people that said we were going to be in a weaker position, it's because the market or competitive forces did it to us. It's a very fixed mindset. Those that said we're going to be stronger said we are going to be able to develop the skills and capabilities necessary to compete. That's the growth mindset. We can do the work to make it happen.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:45:55) And so it's that mindset shift that's really important. I don't remember what question you asked to get me off on my soapbox, but that's one of my soapboxes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:04) I love that soapbox. I'm a huge fan of it because it's almost become like a flag people can wave. Like, when I understand that people understand the growth mindset and live it out, it's a way we can connect because it's important and it takes a lot of work, and it's not easy. It's actually very difficult. And so I like how you describe this whole thing, especially with, you know, we started the podcast and we ended up, people asked to license the content from it for leadership training programs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:37) So we built a sales team and started selling into leadership development. And so we got to see all these different companies, and we got to see how they respond to a leadership sales process, and then what type of customers were the best customers, what type of customers we wanted more of, things of that nature. And so that gave me insight to how different organizations see the continuing education of their people. And interesting enough, the organizations that were tech oriented that were used to this behavior of, you know, we have this problem. Let's go grab this solution, evaluate all solutions, and implement it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:17) And they weren't concerned with the fact that it was a digital solution. Right? Like, digital leadership training. They actually like that because most of their people were distributed and they couldn't get everybody together in person. And then some of the older companies were like, no, no, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:31) We fly everyone in from every corner of the Earth.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:47:33) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:34) We do our workshops and stuff. And so it was just interesting to see how the different companies were making business decisions. It was the same business decision as leadership development, but it was interesting to see how their leadership saw it. And my dataset tends to be biased towards forward, advanced thinking companies. But I have to remember that today, if I take a step back out of it, I think that's like the 20%.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:00) I think there are a lot of old companies out there that are old mindset, and they just are the quiet majority that I don't get to know.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:48:07) Absolutely. Yeah. And when you're talking about old companies, we actually in our research suggests that anything older than ten years is really an old company. Not as bad as the fifty year mark, but that ten year—and I use mobile devices as the justification there. If your company was born in a pre-iPhone era, you're going to go about the business differently than company.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:48:33) And people forget that Facebook really had to pivot hard to the mobile environment. And as late recently as 2012, people questioned whether Facebook was going to be able to adapt to a mobile environment. And clearly, they've proven they're up to that. But that was a leadership decision by Zuckerberg to make some big time changes in terms of how their engineers operated to make that happen. So ten years is the beginning.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:49:01) It's like legacy light, and then fifty years is legacy heavy, but legacy nonetheless.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:07) So do you get to talk to the companies a lot about approaching the new markets, or is that just a side thing that you research sometimes? Did they ask you to talk about that?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:49:15) As they're approaching new markets?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:18) So I'll give you some background as, like, why I'm kind of interested in this. So we started a leadership company, and it started growing. And then the podcast ended up doing better than the leadership company.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:49:30) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:31) And then so we focused more of the resource, the sales resources, because we're a small team, under 10, on the podcast, and that's growing. And so now we're talking about, like, what's our next move? Do we do a premium and grow the podcast? Do we invest in another sales team and continue to go to the leadership company? And we're trying to evaluate these different options.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:49:51) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:52) And it's hard because there's two things that go through my mind. The first thing is, you know, what could be a $100 million a year business? And so we can go after that. And the second thing that goes through my mind that is kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum is just focus on getting revenue up 25% every quarter and just deal in the real time and figure out what can we do right now to get revenue. What's one small change we can make? And so I kind of go back and forth between these two things.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:50:22) Yeah. That's a good question. I'm not sure I certainly don't know the answer. You know, one thing to think about is what would be an exit strategy for you as a company. And, you know, a logical exit strategy would be to get acquired by a large online learning company for your content.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:50:43) And so I would think a doubling down on the podcast might make the acquisition route a little easier because you would have unique content that you could then license, or they'd pay you to keep creating. And so it really I think it depends on your goals. If acquisition and exit is what you're in for, then that might be a better route. If, you know, you're having fun doing it and you just want to keep the ride going, the other one may be a better route. Certainly, once you—the competition at the upper levels of podcastness is really stiff.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:51:23) You know? I would think it's sort of a really steep—so making progress, you know, it's I think it's going to be more challenging going forward for you because you're coming against the big dogs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:33) Yeah. We're definitely in that top tier of podcast now, and the things that we've been evaluating are—we know how to sell podcast and podcast advertising. And so do you need to talk to somebody?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:51:48) No. My son just stuck his head in for some reason, so it's all fine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:52) Xbox bandwidth is down because that's streaming Zoom.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:51:55) Hey. I upgraded to gigabit the minute their first day home from school. So we should be good bandwidth wise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:02) On top of it. Yep. So we were looking. We were like, okay. We're really good at selling the podcast advertising.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:07) What if we just started selling for other podcasts? Like, if we did a licensing deal and split revenue, that'd be a small move, but you could get to $100 million. If we had 100 podcasts, they're all making a million dollars a year, there's a way, and it's a small move. The other move was, you know, because that provides me an exit strategy. Doing the podcast, hard exit strategy because I'm the host and it's my thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:32) But if we had a media company that sold—did sales for hundreds of podcast or YouTube influencers or things like that, that's a sellable entity. And then over here, we also had the leadership stuff. I got a little discouraged selling the leadership stuff, to be honest with you. One of the questions I was asking myself is, where do you want to spend your time?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:52:54) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:54) How would you spend your day? And I find that I felt a little bad with doing the leadership training stuff because I felt like the customers in the market, there was one type of customer had a problem and leadership training is not going to solve it. You know, they just—you need better people. I don't know how else to say that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:12) But there's that problem. And then there's, you know, the positive people who just want continuous improvement and growth mindset. The thing is, they're so small of a market.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:53:23) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:23) It's hard to really find those people. So those are kind of the two things that I'm playing around with in my head right now.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:53:31) Yeah. Well, I think I mean, can you try both, you know, in small experiments and see which—you know, I'm a big fan of experimentation, and it's something that this was also in the book that companies just don't do enough of is run a couple of small things. You know, maybe get a podcast—get one podcast that you like. Search the market and find one that you think is under-monetizing itself and approach them and ask if you can do a revenue sharing model if you help upsell them and see if it works and see how hard it is and also do the other thing. And just, when I give career advice to my students, and you're sort of the age you could have been my student probably, is I always—my philosophy is always have three potential career paths going at any one time.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:54:21) And so I'm keeping three alive right now, which is, you know, do I move to a larger research university and sort of set up my own research lab with funding and stuff like that? Do I pursue administration and, you know, be a dean somewhere? Or do I, you know, try the consulting route and ramp that up to a sort of a sizable side business? And right now, I have activities that are going on that enable all three of those. And I'm going along until I get an offer I can't refuse, and then I'll take that path and come up with three new outlets and opportunities.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:55:01) So yeah. I know you have a limited amount of time, but try some small experiments. Because who knows? You know, you could be a WePay where you don't know what the sort of the ultimate business is until you do some experimentation and find that product market fit out there. I mean, I think all of your strategies that you've listed are viable.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:55:21) Which one is right? I don't know if anybody can tell you. And so it's how do you run those small experiments? How do you A/B test it to see which one's going to catch on in the marketplace? And then when you run the experiment, and if it doesn't work, make sure you identify why it doesn't work.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:55:34) And if it does work, make sure you identify why it works, because learning is going to be the most important part.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:41) I wish people talked more about the scientific method in business because when I—I did the public speaking last year as well, had a couple talks, and I did 52 or 55 of them.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:55:55) Holy smokes. That's a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:58) I know. So but this year, they were like, everything got canceled.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:56:01) Of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:02) So I did that, but one of the most common requested talks was about fear, fear inside of the executives of trying new things. And so I came up with this concept of, you know, act like a scientist. You know, they don't beat themselves up if the experiment doesn't work. They just note it and keep trying. And they try 10 things. They take the best three that worked, make variations, and repeat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:27) And that's one of those pieces of information that I constantly remind myself about because it's so easy to forget it and it's so good.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:56:35) Yeah. It is. And certainly, as companies are getting more and better data, that opportunity to run experiments goes up because when you're tracking all the data, when you make a change—so we interviewed one company called Humanyze, and that's what they do is people analytics. And this is an old example. I've talked to them again recently for the new book.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:56:58) But in the old book, it was they found that—I forgot what company it was. They're working with a call center or a tech company. And they found that if they change the size of the tables in the lunchroom, job satisfaction went way up because you were sitting with more people, you were eating with more people, you were having more conversations, and that engagement really clicked up. But if you didn't have the data, you wouldn't know that. And so it gives them the opportunity to run those experiments and then find out if it works.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:57:31) And that's really the key, but I'm a huge fan of experimentation. I'm a scientist, so I should be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:39) I'm curious. What actually makes a scientist? Like, where—what type of designation makes a scientist?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:57:47) Well, I would consider myself a social scientist. So, you know, and I do have a PhD in it. So at least have the credentials. Do you need a PhD to be a scientist? Probably not.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:58:00) You know, it's I think it's, you know, just the designation of people who—who's practicing the scientific method of forming hypotheses and testing them in whatever form or fashion it takes a place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:15) I like that. I just always ask when things pop into my head. I was like, man, maybe there's this special scientist thing that—

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:58:21) It's a club and, you know, I have my membership card. You have to pay your dues and all that sort of stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:29) Because I call myself a life scientist, and the reason is is because I actually track my data, and I have journals and I try things, and I pull things in and out of my life that bring me value. And I'm like, if I don't have the special designation, that's fine because I am operating the scientific method regardless of if I've taken some other test to show the world that.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 00:58:51) You know? And so you do this with your life. Do you do it with your company as well?

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:56) So, yeah. I definitely did at—I do it in different ways. So I did it with topics on the show, testing out which topics people wanted to hear about, using the mailing list to do that too. And that I got from higher level topics to more granular topics. I've—I did that in our early stage of revenue with pricing, trying out different pricing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:20) That was very important. So we scienced the pricing. We scienced how to get new subscribers through advertising, you know, which methods work the best of all. So we first started on a method level, and then we went down from the method into the individuals. And so we just tracked the stuff. No special tools or anything, just spreadsheets. And then we're working on it right now where, you know, we've brought in some new members into the team. So we're kind of—you go through that forming process of bringing new members in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:49) And so now the thing we've been talking about by the past week is, you know, what do we want to do? And what kicked all of this off was I was reading some notes from myself from two or three years ago, and I said, you know, if I got to spend my days talking to some of the greatest people in technology in the world and sharing ideas and learning from them directly, that would be the most dream thing. I think it'll take me probably an entire lifetime to achieve to get there. And then looking back, I'm like, I got there within three years. So then I had this—

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:00:22) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:23) Odd issue to approach of—I completed something I thought would take a lifetime. And so now I have to find something new.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:00:33) What's next?

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:34) Yeah. And I don't want to pick something too small. I don't want to pick something too big. So I was like, well, I read some books, some life stories of billionaires, just out of interest. And the reoccurring trend I found through those texts were that they always got their goal or their objective, or right at it near it, and their regret, if anything, was not picking a bigger one.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:58) And so I said, well, let's try for a $100 million company. And the reason being because I think it would be cool to bring that much value to the marketplace.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:01:10) Yeah. I think it's a good goal. I mean, good luck, and I can say I knew you when.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:16) There are so many of them, though. There are so many companies that make over $100 million a year.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:01:21) Yep. And that's really the big—so my colleague who runs this Tech Trek program with me is a venture capitalist. And so he really—$100 million is what he considers the hard part. You know, that that is a—some that benchmark is something that sets companies apart. That's a real—and once you get to that, then you get momentum going.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:01:44) In fact, we were visiting Foursquare, the tech company in New York. And I, you know, I studied them way back in the day when they were a social media location company. And I was like, wow. They're still around? I didn't think.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:01:58) I thought it was gonna be this little dinky, you know, social media has-been. Well, here they pivoted their business model to making better location data, and they've licensed that technology out, and they're a $100 million company now. And it's just crazy to think a company that I had written off, you know, they just done something different, and I didn't notice it. And it was really—we got to talk to the founder, and he was just a really great guy.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:24) Yeah. I was reading a poll about why startups fail, and they had all these options—you know, lack of funding, this, that, over-competitive market. And the only thing I could take away from that was they were missing the most important option, and that was that they gave up.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:02:42) Yeah. My colleague, when he's talking about why startups fail, his answer is because they run out of money. I mean, that's—they just, they don't give up. They just don't have any more to sort of—they don't have any more money to keep trying, and nobody's willing to give it to them. So that's really the problem.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:00) Yeah. But I'd counter that with they still gave up.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:03:04) Yeah. I would—

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:06) You could go on food stamps, you could live in a box, and you could keep trying to get it going. Because, like, that's the thing that pushed me through the first three years of this business to get it to where it is today. It was like there are so many times that I was like, "Oh, crap. We don't have money. Or it's not going to work."

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:25) And I was just like, I refused to let myself say that, like, I—it'll give up. And I was just like, I just can't. I cannot do it. Right? I won't do it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:35) And then, I mean, now we're at the point where after almost three years, we are right on the edge of cash flow positive. And now in the next, you know, month or two, we'll be definitely cash flow positive. And it's exciting to be in a position where you're not drowning anymore. And now it's like, where do we want to swim to?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:03:57) Yeah. Exactly. Wow. Now what's next? What do we do now?

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:00) Yeah. But thank you for your insight. You remind me that we just need to apply, you know, you brought this perspective to me today, so I'm very grateful for that—to, like, step back and just apply the scientific method. Because the past week I've kind of been like, "Oh, we could do all these options, you know." Yep. But just take a step back, get the spreadsheet out, list the actions, and start measuring and testing and repeating, and then we'll be in a better position.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:04:27) Hit on something. Yep. And then once you get some data you like, you try another one, and you just ramp it up, and—or you learn what doesn't work, you know, the whole Edison thing. Yes. I haven't failed.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:04:39) I've just learned a thousand things that don't work. And so that's—I think that's a good life lesson.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:47) Well, Jerry, you're amazing, my friend. I am so glad I had you on that wish list.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:04:51) Oh, thank you. I am literally honored to be on the list. So thank you for reaching out, and it's been a really fascinating conversation, and I hope you'll have me back.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:01) Yes. And so the book—the title of the book, people can buy it on Amazon, it is?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:05:07) The Technology Fallacy: How People Are the Real Key to Digital Transformation.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:11) And did you do an Audible version of this?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:05:14) I asked to read the Audible. There is an Audible version narrated by a guy named Jack Legala, I think. And he does a great job with it. I really wanted to narrate my own audiobook, but they wouldn't let me.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:28) Everyone says that.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:05:29) Yeah. I've got a voice for—

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:33) For it, man. You're a public speaker. It's what you do. You speak for a living.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:05:36) The one funny thing about—and but he probably did a better job than I ever could have. I have to—I mean, it was fun.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:44) I disagree.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:05:44) Well, thank you. I appreciate that. What's hilarious to me—well, not always. And this is what's hilarious to me—is we have a lot of quotes from our executives that we've interviewed. And, of course, I've spoken to all of them personally.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:05:58) And the audiobook reader will put on a different accent when he's referring to different people. And I'm like, "No. That guy's from Australia. He doesn't sound anything like that." And so it's funny. I have these jarring moments of "so-and-so says," and it's a voice that's so totally not them. But, of course, I am the only one who would have that critique, but it's still funny to listen to.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:22) Well, maybe self-publish your next book.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:06:25) Yeah. Well, MIT Press comes with a little bit of cache to it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:30) So nice, though.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:06:31) Yeah. I mean, so it's—and my boss at BC likes me publishing through academic publishers. So maybe I'll get to the point someday, but my day—I still get credit in my day job for publishing in academic books and academic publishers. So I'll keep that up for a while.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:48) And let's give a shout-out for your public speaking career. What type of talks are you giving right now if people are interested in having you come talk to their teams?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:06:56) Yeah. Right now, what I'm really working on is some variation. So, you know, the Technology Fallacy is this big, which it is—I mean, it's five years worth of research now, adding the COVID stuff on top of it. I try to carve out—I'm trying to not disappear—like, what is the most relevant part for companies?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:07:20) And I speak with companies and say, "Okay. What do you need? Do you need an overview of this? Do you need a focus here? Let's work on your problem." And a lot of it's just about getting the companies and the teams on the same page with the same language, with the same mental models so they can start communicating with one another and figuring out how to solve their shared problems. So I do anything from thirty minutes to three days with companies. Yeah. Three days is a little harder in a pure online setting now, but I used to go to companies and do workshops and such like that. So, but the virtual opens up new opportunities here.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:07:56) You know, I'm able to really customize—you know, basically, my fee used to be, you have to pay me to get on a plane. And there's a fixed fee to get me on a plane for an overnight. Now I can really tailor it to whatever company's needs are—to talk to boards, to talk to groups, whether it be HR or marketing or tech, to talk to certain smaller teams. So anybody that's sort of really wrestling with "what are our next steps digitally," that's my target audience. And one thing, having worked with consultants now for seven years, you know, because they're the sponsors and the co-authors on the book—all consultants do is take knowledge they learned in talking to customer A and sell that knowledge to customer B, and then take the knowledge they learned from customer B and sell it to customer C.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:08:47) And that's what I've done in these interviews, and I just charge a lot less than the consultants do.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:52) So if they want to learn more about that, do you have a personal website, or how do they get in touch with you?

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:08:56) www.profkane, P-R-O-F-K-A-N-E, dot com, or just Google Gerald Kane, and I'm usually the first Google site to come up. Or Gerald C. Kane. And then, when you're a digital professor, you tend to have a pretty good online footprint.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:17) Yes. Well, man, thank you so much, Jerry. I really appreciate it. I'm gonna have you back on next year when you've got the book.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:09:23) Thanks. This was a great conversation. I appreciate it. I tell you, I've done a lot of these episodes, and you're definitely a natural at this.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:30) Well, thank you so much. And thank you for the advice, by the way. That's like—it was very useful. Like, good conversations with smart people really help push us in the right direction. So that's useful business knowledge. I'm gonna get off this call and get on a call with the team and talk with them about it, and we're gonna start sciencing this business model out.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:09:52) Sounds good.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:53) Thank you so much, buddy.

(Gerald Kane (Jerry) at 01:09:54) Thank you. Bye-bye.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:58) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.