Rob Thomas - SVP of Software at IBM

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Rob Thomas, the SVP of Software at IBM. And we discuss three magical skills that everyone should focus on, how to manage fear when leading teams, and why you will fail as a leader if you believe you have to do everything yourself. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:25) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Rob Thomas at 00:00:37) Hello, hello, hello, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) It's Rob. I'm so excited to talk to you today, man.

(Rob Thomas at 00:00:43) Great to meet you. Yeah, I appreciate this. This is great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:46) I've been cyber stalking you, reading all of your blog content.

(Rob Thomas at 00:00:52) Good deal. Well, hopefully we have a lot of things to talk about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:55) Yeah. When did you start writing?

(Rob Thomas at 00:00:57) Probably a decade ago. And it's one of these things where I probably wrote for three years, and I don't think anybody ever read anything I wrote, which was fine. But you learn just by doing, like in anything else. And so after a while, some people started to read, and it probably got a little better. But it can still always get better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:18) Was there an initial inspiration, or how did you first get interested in it?

(Rob Thomas at 00:01:25) One of the thoughts I had was I read a lot, a ton. And everything I was reading, I was writing down and keeping notes for myself. And at some point, I realized this could actually be valuable to somebody else and could save them a lot of time if I could distill this into something that is more condensed, maybe put in a different form. So it was really just about, could I share the things that I'm learning and do that in a more scalable way. Selfishly, it also helps me remember what I was learning.

(Rob Thomas at 00:01:59) Because if you take a bunch of notes on something, then you have to convert it and put your own spin on it. It actually shows that you know the material. So the old adage of, if you want to be an expert in something, learn to teach it. Because if you can teach it, then you probably really know it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:17) Yeah. I read your article. The first one, my first exposure to Rob Thomas content was your general management instruction guide. And so my team had sent that over or I saw it, and I was going through it and I was just blown away. Right? Because I've read so many books and I've had so much experience building businesses and things of that nature. But for you to articulate it in such a clear, concise manner as an instruction, I just started reading it and I was like, yes, yes, yes, this is amazing. And then I saw some stuff that I didn't understand and I'm like, oh, that shows how little experience I have. That's gonna probably mean more to me in the future. And so it was really great to get to read that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:06) And as I'm reading it, all the stories of these lessons I've learned were coming up inside. And so I was like, this guy's brilliant. I'm so excited to talk to him.

(Rob Thomas at 00:03:16) I don't think brilliant, but I appreciate you saying that. The reason I wrote that was we've got a lot of people in IBM that aspire to run big businesses. And to me, there's what you read in academic books where I think it's really hard to apply that stuff. And then a lot of that was literally notes that I've taken over the last twenty years, mostly informed by bad decisions or mistakes that I made. And I was hoping for it to be something super practical where anybody could pick that up and maybe apply one or two things to what they're doing.

(Rob Thomas at 00:03:57) And the groups I shared it within IBM seemed to enjoy it and found it that way. So I hope it accomplished that. That was really the objective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:07) Yeah. After I read it, I was like, this guy needs to write a book. And then I googled to see if you had written and you've written a couple of books, and you actually have one that just came out called The AI Ladder.

(Rob Thomas at 00:04:17) I never planned to write a book. One blog post I wrote, I think it was seven years ago. And out of the blue, I got contacted by Wiley, the publisher in the UK. And the woman said, hey, I think this blog post would make a great book. Have you ever thought about writing a book? And I said, definitely not. But I thought about it overnight, and I called her back. I was like, sure, I'll give it a shot.

(Rob Thomas at 00:04:47) That one, the book ended up being called Big Data Revolution. And the blog post I'd written was just how data is being used in different industries, which I think is fairly obvious now. Maybe it was less obvious seven or eight years ago. And it's really hard to write a book. That's what I learned.

(Rob Thomas at 00:05:05) What's funny about that one was I started interviewing a bunch of people trying to build content for the book. I talked to a guy. I forget how, I think I just contacted him randomly, and he was in Rwanda, an Oxford professor in Rwanda who'd done a lot of homework in the areas of data. And he's like, hey, this book sounds interesting. Can I write it with you?

(Rob Thomas at 00:05:32) And at that point, I was so deep and trying to figure out how I was gonna do this. I would take anything. So I was like, sure. So he became Patrick McSherry is his name. He became the coauthor on the first book.

(Rob Thomas at 00:05:42) Second book was I realized that every company is becoming a tech company, so I called it The End of Tech Companies, meaning we're no longer gonna call companies tech companies because every company is gonna become one. That one I did by myself. And then the most recent one, The AI Ladder, is really just about how do companies adopt AI. It's kind of get rid of all the hype and all the noise about AI. Ultimately, AI is about your data. Do you understand your data? Can you make sense of your data? That was really the focus of that one. So I became an accidental author of books.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:19) That's exciting, my friend. I learned so much from writing my first book because half the people will love you and half of them will yell at you.

(Rob Thomas at 00:06:30) I mean, I love seeing some of the negative reactions you get, like comments on Amazon, and my wife gets annoyed because she's like, why does this person hate you? I was like, I don't know, but there's really nothing we can do about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:45) That was in your management guide. I think you said something along the lines of, you can't please everyone, so don't try. Absolutely. Yeah. That's one that I have had to learn to deal with, trying not to read the comments, and I've actually completely shut down notifications in my personal life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:15) So my phone is perpetually in do not disturb mode, just because the videos and everything and the podcast gets posted. And so I just kind of shut it all off and I am 100%, and that's a measurable number, I'm 100% happier.

(Rob Thomas at 00:07:31) Sounds like a good move.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:33) So you've been at IBM for over twenty years, right? Yes. Was that your first job?

(Rob Thomas at 00:07:40) It was. I was an undergrad, and I went straight to graduate school. And then coming out of graduate school, went straight to IBM, and it's been tremendous. I started with IBM in consulting. It's really funny going into consulting when you come out of school because consulting, fundamentally, you're trying to convince somebody to pay you for advice.

(Rob Thomas at 00:08:05) And I just came out of school. I literally know nothing. So trying to think about how are you going to add value enough that somebody's willing to pay you when it's obvious that you're just out of school. I think I look like I was 12 when I joined IBM. So it forces you to learn a lot.

(Rob Thomas at 00:08:24) I remember one of the earliest stories, this was three weeks in IBM. All the new hires were sitting in a room, and one of the, we called them principals, now we call them partners, walks into the room and says, hey, I just signed a deal. I need somebody that knows Visio that can work on this project, and looks around the room, and everybody just looks at their keyboard. Nobody knows it. And so I sat there in the uncomfortable silence, and then I raised my hand. I was like, I know it. No problem. And so she's like, okay, great. So we're gonna start next week. So she leaves the room. I was like, I gotta figure out what Visio is. I've never even heard of it.

(Rob Thomas at 00:09:05) And so I literally left the office that day, went to a bookstore, bought three books on Visio. Now, luckily, some of your listeners may not know what Visio is, but it's basically a workflow tool. So I spent the next few days and the weekend learning how to do it, and then I was employed for the next couple months. And so to me, I don't even know why I did that, but I was like, I have nothing else to do. Why would I not say I can and try to figure it out?

(Rob Thomas at 00:09:37) Luckily, I could. But I think that's the nature of really anything. Certainly, when you're early in your career, I encourage people, you've really gotta be willing to try anything. Don't define yourself as this is what I am or this is what I know. Just try anything. And you can learn pretty fast if you're willing to go buy the books or whatever it takes to do that. And now there's even more. I mean, this was before YouTube. Right? You can learn anything on YouTube these days.

(Rob Thomas at 00:10:06) So that was kind of one of the early experiences that, I guess, just taught me that careers are really all about learning. And if you can learn faster than others, then you can probably do really well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:21) Are you connected with the next generation of people coming out of colleges? Do you go speak to them when they're joining IBM early today?

(Rob Thomas at 00:10:31) I am. So different levels. Out of the blue, I had somebody contact me. I think it was Sacred Heart on Long Island, and said, hey, I think they'd seen something I wrote and said, will you come talk to the class? So I went and did that for an evening, which is actually really fun because you realize how curious and just generally interested students are of trying to figure out what to do with their lives. I'm pretty heavily involved at the University of Florida, which is where I went to graduate school. I've spoken to some of the classes there. And then as we bring new hires into IBM, I love to go talk to that. We've got some new hire classes that I speak to.

(Rob Thomas at 00:11:16) So all different forms of that, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:19) Are you picking up on any trends of the incoming generation? Because, I mean, you've been doing this for two decades. Have you seen changes happen, and what are you learning there?

(Rob Thomas at 00:11:30) Without a doubt, the biggest, and I think it's a little bit because of what we've done around the areas of AI, the number one topic that comes up on those forms now is data science. And I do encourage them. Look, it's really hard to come out of school today. First of all, I can't imagine trying to get into college today. I certainly couldn't get into college today anywhere that I went. I can't imagine trying to get a job. But what I tell them is if you want a bulletproof resume that guarantees you a job, do something in computer science or data science. It will be impossible not to get a job.

(Rob Thomas at 00:12:06) And so I do try to encourage people to think in that direction because these are fields that will run for the next fifty years probably. So that topic often comes up. I do see people that are just really curious about how to chart a career path, and I try to encourage them not to get too ahead of themselves. It's good to have ambitious goals, and the bigger your goals, the better. But to kind of go back to the Visio story, it's about just get somewhere where you like the people, where you're doing work that's interesting, and then be willing to raise your hand and volunteer and do whatever necessary.

(Rob Thomas at 00:12:46) And if you do that, things are probably gonna take care of themselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:51) But, Rob, that takes a long time, and it's a lot of hard work.

(Rob Thomas at 00:12:56) I know. We are an instant gratification society now, but I think there's a lot of value in the hard work. Right? The years where things don't go quite as you were hoping, the promotion you don't get, the job you didn't get, all of that actually makes you way stronger. So I encourage people to even stick with it too because sometimes people react to something doesn't go right. Oh, now I gotta go do something else. Hey, there's probably a lot of value to sticking with something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:28) Oh, yeah. We have a saying around the office here. It's called don't quit in the dip. When it dips down, don't quit.

(Rob Thomas at 00:13:36) Well said. And I think the ease, look, it's human nature to quit. That's the easy way out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:42) But you can't. You gotta keep going. Because when you do, there's growth on the other side of that pain. And that's the thing that, my wife said the other day for Christmas, I think her mom got us a scratch off lottery thing in our stocking. I'm like, okay, but I'm very grateful for the gift. But she asked me, she's like, oh, why don't you play the lottery? And I'm like, I don't want it to go down that way. I don't want it to happen that way for me. I'm already seeing the fruits of working very hard for a long period of time, and I want that to be the way it happens for me.

(Rob Thomas at 00:14:19) I played a lot of sports growing up, and so I have a little bit of a bias when I'm talking to people. I love people that have competed in sports or competed in something else. But the reason I say sports is you lose way more than you win in sports. You miss way more shots. You miss way more pitches.

(Rob Thomas at 00:14:41) So you basically learn how to lose. Anybody that plays sports learns how to lose a lot. But then the value is how do you bounce back. So I think it tells you a lot about people if they can, like you say, manage through that dip and kind of push through and find the other side.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:00) What are you spending the majority of your time on today?

(Rob Thomas at 00:15:05) IBM is at an amazing point where to give it in big chapters, really from early 1990 until last year, we had really become a services company, a technology services company. And we're now taking IBM back to its roots, being more of a core technology software company. We still have services. It's important. But that takes a lot of work to get everybody on board with this direction.

(Rob Thomas at 00:15:39) And so it's a lot of fun. I have most of the software business at this stage, and it's about getting everybody in IBM excited about making IBM the world's greatest technology company. And so it's a mix of hiring people, building products, reviewing products. I spend a lot of time with clients, all online at this point. But it's a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:08) Yeah. I saw that you guys have done some acquisitions recently.

(Rob Thomas at 00:16:12) Yeah. We just closed an acquisition with a company called Instana. This team that we'd seen some of their work. We did all of the due diligence and acquisition work via Zoom. It's amazing that we can do that these days.

(Rob Thomas at 00:16:28) We're really excited to have them. Every company has hundreds of different software applications, and Instana helps make it really easy to manage those applications and how they make a business digitally enabled. So we've done that one. We've done a few in services areas. So always a lot of things to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:50) Can you, you've said this a couple times, but can you help me understand, you were talking about services versus another line of business. I think it was the software. Can you help me understand what the differences are?

(Rob Thomas at 00:17:01) So I describe it this way. We have a consulting business, which is think of that as management consulting. We help companies implement software or transform their business. And that's a key part of what we do. That was built out of the consulting business that I started with originally.

(Rob Thomas at 00:17:20) And then when we acquired PricewaterhouseCoopers, that's that business. We announced the spin-off of our managed infrastructure business, which is outsourcing. So kind of a different kind of services, which is managing servers. So that's being spun out of IBM. And then we have a software business, and we have a hardware business because clients still love using mainframes, which is great.

(Rob Thomas at 00:17:46) We've got software that runs on those. So just think of it as different lines of business in IBM. When it comes to software, we really do four major things. We do a lot in automation, so helping companies automate business processes, automate their IT. We do security, so helping companies protect themselves from the bad guys and manage security.

(Rob Thomas at 00:18:10) We do a lot in data and AI. And then what I'd call modernization, helping customers that want to move to the cloud. Those are really the four big areas under software for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:25) Interesting. I didn't—the automation stuff is transforming my business. I mean, I have a small business, but the amount of usefulness from these automation tools that exist out there—and there's a whole spectrum of them, from Zapier, which is pushing data between stuff, to things like ClickUp, which is helping us do task and dependent tasks for customer deliverables. We've just really embraced—we got from the spreadsheet doing everything manually, and then we grew as a business enough to where we're like, we need better solutions. And that's when we started looking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:00) But I was so happy about how mature the market was compared to the time when I needed this last, which was about ten years ago when I had a company I was growing. And the solutions were not that mature. It was almost just you had to build everything yourself if you wanted it to work right. And now there's just so much advancement.

(Rob Thomas at 00:19:19) And it has a big impact for a business like yours. That's why I'm always a little shocked whenever—when most people hear automation, it immediately sets off a little bit of a fear factor. Oh, is that going to take jobs? Is that going to replace me?

(Rob Thomas at 00:19:35) And I try to redirect that and say, you know, AI is not going to replace managers, but the managers that use AI are going to replace the ones that don't. Because think about how much more effective your business is now that you're using those kind of capabilities. And if your competitor wasn't, they'd be running around doing all this stuff manually. It wouldn't be very efficient. And so anything in automation, whether it's how you manage your assets or how you manage your supply chain or customer support or billing, it actually gives the users superpowers.

(Rob Thomas at 00:20:14) It makes them way better at their job, which is why I encourage people. Don't react to the media hype of this is going to destroy jobs. It's actually going to make people a lot more productive, which is positive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:26) So what type of IBM automation software is there? Like, is it self-serve?

(Rob Thomas at 00:20:32) The hottest product, certainly since COVID hit, is something called Watson Assistant, which is a virtual agent. All your customer service can be done using software. And it's self-service. Anybody can go on the web and try it. CVS is actually using it right now for COVID vaccine distribution questions.

(Rob Thomas at 00:20:57) Royal Bank of Scotland uses it for all of their customer service, and now half of the time somebody calls Royal Bank of Scotland, they're just interacting with an AI agent. And that means that all of their actual agents can spend way more time on the hard problems. So you can see why COVID kind of accelerated that because when people woke up one day and realized, suddenly everything's virtual, how are we going to do this? Having a virtual agent at the, you know, metaphorical chair next to you that can answer all the questions or most of the questions, it can have a huge impact.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:33) And you used to be on the Watson team, right?

(Rob Thomas at 00:21:36) Yeah. So it's interesting. Watson originally was Jeopardy. That's how most people recognize. That's kind of when it came on the scene.

(Rob Thomas at 00:21:46) Then we spent the better part of seven or eight years doing a lot of experimentation, and a lot of that was back to the services discussion. It was kind of custom services work because when companies saw Jeopardy, everybody is like, I want my own AI. The thing that's changed in the last three years is we've really built this out as a product business. Things like Watson Assistant have really gone mainstream, self-service, like you said. We've got things like Watson Discovery, which is basically just understanding all of your documents, all of your text, all of your data.

(Rob Thomas at 00:22:25) So we've got some really great products now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:29) That's interesting. You mentioned understanding your documents because last night, I happened to watch Cosmos: Possible Worlds with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and they had an episode at the end. I didn't see any of the other episodes. I just went right to the end one to see it because it was about the future and I'm a big fan of the future. And in there he revisits the World's Fair of like 1949 or something, some date.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:56) But a segment in that episode is this kid walks up to them discussing an IBM computer and it's like this giant machine. And the kid writes a date on an index card or a punch card-type thing and hands it to the person. They put in the machine and it reads out on a display, like an old school—I forget what they're called, but like the LED-type displays. And it reads out the headline of the most important news article for that day. So it was reading handwritten characters, and this is like forever ago.

(Rob Thomas at 00:23:38) Hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:38) But it was IBM. Have you seen that or no?

(Rob Thomas at 00:23:41) I have not. You intrigued me. I want to see that. I just read the book called The Maverick and His Machine, which is a book about Thomas J. Watson. So it kind of goes through a lot of that, which is actually an incredible book.

(Rob Thomas at 00:23:57) But now I got something to watch, so I appreciate the tip.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:00) Yeah. I've never seen handwriting recognition on such a legacy machine. Okay. Here's a topic I'm interested in. I'm asking around about different guests and stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:14) So it's about outsourcing, right? The outsourcing. So I was talking with Ryan. He's the CEO of this company called X-Team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:23) And the most interesting thing about my conversation with him was definitely the company culture, but their business model is they do the, you know, high-performance on-demand teams, right? So like outsourcing for companies. But for me, my experience, I built apps for like over a decade and I just went usually directly to consumers or investors came to me or something of that nature. I didn't understand that there's this whole sub-market—or it's a large market of these app development companies or technology engineering companies that are building tools and things like that for other businesses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:00) And so I was fascinated from a business perspective about how just having a visualization for how the economy is set up, because I'm just nerdy like that. But then came up the question of, you know, when do the companies decide to use the outsourcing agencies and how do they decide to do that versus hiring more internal? It looks like a lot of them have massive internal engineering teams, but also use a bunch of outsourced people as well. How do you decide that?

(Rob Thomas at 00:25:27) You know, it's very situational. Anything that is core to our business, at the heart of major product lines, chances are we'll probably build that ourselves because it entails core know-how and IP, and it's just a lot faster and more efficient to do it ourselves. Sometimes if we're going into a new area—so let's say it's an area we've not gone into before. A good way to trial that is go build out the, you know, an MVP or a first rev using a business partner like you described. And if it works, then later you could bring it in-house, or you could continue to scale with that partner.

(Rob Thomas at 00:26:16) But it's kind of a managed risk way to go do something new because then you don't have to distract your existing team. That's like one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is maybe you have a more mature product that's kind of just doing feature developments and feature additions every year. That can be done by a partner as well. I think the biggest thing that has changed, and it goes back a little bit to where you went on automation, the collaboration tools, the way that you can work with a third party have become so much better that the friction to working with a partner is way less than it was even five years ago.

(Rob Thomas at 00:26:57) The partners that we use, we communicate with them via Slack. It's really easy. It's as if they're sitting next to us in an IBM office because it's just, you know, a couple keystrokes away. I think that's one of the biggest, I'd say, accelerators of that as a trend is just the collaboration, the communication overhead, if you will. Overhead's gone way down, so it's just become a lot easier to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:24) So if we take that trend that you just mentioned about just everyone getting closer and it being easier to work with partners and advancing the technology, if we extend that out like another decade, what sort of visions do you have about the future?

(Rob Thomas at 00:27:37) So I'll give you two slightly opposing views. I'm not a big believer in this idea that we're all going to work in our homes the rest of our lives. We're all going to move out to the country, leave cities. I don't believe that's going to happen. I think people have kind of overreacted in the short term on that because I think humans fundamentally want to interact with other humans.

(Rob Thomas at 00:28:01) So I think we're going to still have a very strong office culture. It's an important part of how we'll build products, that type of thing. That said, when it comes to something like, hey, we're going to go into this new area. We don't have to choose a partner based on physically where they are because we've all become pretty good at working digitally.

(Rob Thomas at 00:28:24) So we can go hire the best person in the world regardless of where they are pretty quickly to go do something. So I think there's a chance that you'll start to see even more of kind of the outsourced-type work that you're describing, but probably in really small sprints. It's like everything doesn't need to be a one or a two-year project. It could be I need help for three weeks, critical design review, and that's five days. So I think because we're more comfortable with that kind of work, which is certainly what we've all been forced to do in the last year, I think that becomes much more accessible.

(Rob Thomas at 00:29:06) But, again, I say it's an opposing view because I think the norm is actually going to be more of a return to people working together physically, but it's opened up this opportunity to find the best skill anywhere in the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:21) Yeah. It's shaken everything up, and now it's—it was like a culture shift.

(Rob Thomas at 00:29:24) Now it's even more acceptable than ever to work remote. Yeah. I think before it was like you would assume you were getting lesser quality or it's not going to be as good if I do it that way. I don't think anybody thinks that way anymore because it's become the norm for the better part of the last year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:44) Yeah. And productivity. I've read so many different articles people put out, but one of the themes tends to be that productivity is doing better with people managing their time. I don't know how you would exactly prove that or quantify it, but have you been hearing that at all or no?

(Rob Thomas at 00:30:01) I think it really depends a lot on the company and the situation. So I live in a town in Connecticut where probably 70% of the people that go to work commute into or used to commute into Manhattan every day. That's like two hours each way. So these people all got back four hours per day of their life.

(Rob Thomas at 00:30:24) It's hard for me to think that they're not a little more productive because that is exhausting when you do that over a long period of time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:30) You're not joking, by the way, just so I understand. People really do this. This isn't an exaggeration? They commute four hours?

(Rob Thomas at 00:30:37) Oh, absolutely. Because by the time—think about it—the train itself is like an hour and ten minutes. But by the time you, you know, the twenty minutes before the train and you've got to get there before the train and then getting through the city on the other side, yeah, it's usually two hours. I find it hard to believe that they're not more productive saving that four hours per day.

(Rob Thomas at 00:30:58) And plus, you don't have to get up at 4:30 a.m. and go get on a train. I'm sure they're more productive. I think for people that were spending a lot of time on airplanes traveling, they've probably gotten a little bit out of this. That said, I think I've also realized—I travel a lot. Some of that downtime was helpful for thinking versus just doing.

(Rob Thomas at 00:31:19) And so I think it's a little bit different for everybody, but I certainly think for people that faced huge commutes, this has shown probably a better way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:29) Yeah. How is your team, like, personally, your team? How have they responded to the transition?

(Rob Thomas at 00:31:35) It goes in waves, and I think it's like that for every team. You know, at first, there was a novelty aspect to it. And for IBM, at least, we've always worked with teams across the world around the country. So being on a video call was nothing new back in March when this started. But what was new was never seeing each other face-to-face.

(Rob Thomas at 00:31:56) So at first, there's a level of novelty to it for those of us that traveled a lot, which is many of us. Suddenly, we were having dinner with our families every day, which was great. Getting to see your kids every day, which was great. And then you get six months into it, and you're like, wow. I've been going to the same desk every day.

(Rob Thomas at 00:32:16) That doesn't feel as good. I liked the variety a little bit. This is what I've heard from people. And so it kind of goes in waves. Productivity, I think, has been exceptional to answer that question, but I do believe people really want to get back to some level of interaction in the office.

(Rob Thomas at 00:32:36) I think the thing you miss in a video conference world is the five-minute casual discussion before the meeting or the five minutes after or the passing in the hall. Everything's become so much more transactional. Here's the meeting. What are we here to do? What are we accomplishing?

(Rob Thomas at 00:32:55) And missing those in-between moments—a lot gets lost, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:00) Yeah. And creating a culture digitally takes a lot of effort. One of the things that stood out to me—I highlighted a couple things from that management article I keep mentioning, which I'll definitely post the link in the notes. But one of the things that really stood out to me is you had said something along the lines of you need an intentional strategy to motivate your team. If you don't have one, then you're not going to have a motivated team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:23) And I was like, yes, that's amazing and true. But then I was like, where's the example? What does that look like?

(Rob Thomas at 00:33:31) I think it's different for everybody because you can't motivate people in an inauthentic way. So it is about what is your style. How are you going to do that? I mean, to some extent, that's part of my approach is sharing ideas like that. I do think people get encouraged and get motivated by, hey, you know, these are some good ideas. I can probably learn something by doing this.

(Rob Thomas at 00:33:53) So that's one way to do it. I use Slack a lot. I do monthly, we call them ask me anything. So anybody in the company can come on and ask a question about any topic. And I do get some crazy topics from, you know, what's your favorite food to, you know, what are your children's names to, you know, business things. But just that kind of transparency and people—they realize, hey, this is actually again, this is a real human. This is a normal person.

(Rob Thomas at 00:34:30) It is actually motivating in that respect. So there's lots of different tactics. I study a lot of coaches. I think sports coaches are the best at motivating because it basically determines their ability to do their job. You can learn a lot of techniques by studying people like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:49) Who are some of your—do you have a favorite coach, sports coach that you studied?

(Rob Thomas at 00:34:53) It's hard not to admire Nick Saban. And I don't like Alabama at all because I'm a Gator and a Commodore. But the fact that he's been able to win for so long while having a rotating staff of assistant coaches means he's just built a great system. And when you hear him talk, he's always focused on really just discipline. Are you committed to a process of success, each individual and everybody as a team?

(Rob Thomas at 00:35:25) And the way he just builds different systems to enforce that, I think, is really admirable. So he's clearly done a good job, and it's clearly worked.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:35) Discipline is massively important. When did you realize this in life?

(Rob Thomas at 00:35:40) I think my mom is probably the most disciplined, regimented person that I've ever known, so I probably learned it about age four. So just contagious behavior. Yeah. Always a plan, always written down, always an action item, always a next step. So it was ingrained in me from a very early age and never went away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:04) That's great. What a great mom. Right?

(Rob Thomas at 00:36:06) Absolutely. Tremendous.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:07) Lots of thanks to her. Yeah. One of the compliments I have about your writing, something I noticed that really stood out to me was when you said this a couple of times, but you were talking about assuming nothing will happen unless you incite it to happen. So basically a bunch of places where I would usually see people use the word create or make, you were using different words like incite and there was another one too. And I noticed this subtle difference on how I pick up on the words. I don't know if it's true if you open up a dictionary or whatnot. But some of the other words, when I hear create and make, it seems like I would own that task.

(Rob Thomas at 00:36:48) Like

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:49) But when I hear incite, it seems like I would cause that to happen. It's a small subtle thing. I don't know if that was intentional, but it made a big, it stood out to me as a reader.

(Rob Thomas at 00:37:00) I have a fundamental belief that everybody has greatness inside of them. Many people don't really know how to make it come out. And so I use a word like inciting it because sometimes just asking a question will prompt somebody to think, hey, I can go do that. Or, you know, some minor amount of encouragement. Hey, you mentioned this thing about you were considering the other day. Why don't you just go do that? So you can drag things out of people just by a little bit of encouragement, the right question at the right time. Some people need a little bit of a push, but I'm always, and I shouldn't be surprised anymore, I'm always surprised. People can find another level, another gear, but sometimes they just need something to tweak them a little bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:54) You had this line that was, uh, know your one indelible, which I Googled the word, so I understand now. You had the know your one indelible must win battle and then put your best person in charge of it. And you see, you didn't say and focus on it and go make sure it happens. You just like at the, like, put your best person in charge. So then what do you, you're just doing the other things in the article, which is a lot. Right? So this

(Rob Thomas at 00:38:21) This was written with the idea of, look, general manager, general management in that term in IBM is really a CEO, because these are people that run multibillion dollar businesses. And so they can't do everything. And the phrase I say to my team sometime is, one of the biggest curses of being in a great company like IBM is we can do anything, but we can't do everything. And so you've got to make really intentional decisions. And so I think the leaders that I see struggle are the ones that walk into the office every day and have a list of 60 action items. And because they're disciplined and because they're attentive, they're going to do all 60. But that really doesn't scale because so you've done 60 small things. That's different than knowing the most important thing is that we take that hill this year. And then you turn to the right and you say, you know, Mary, your job is to go take that hill. You are a great leader. You know how to do this. Everything that you've been working on has prepared you for this. You go do that. You tell me what I need to do to help you. It just, you know, then you're scaling because you know you can trust her, and she's going to go do that. It's going to make the whole team better. And then you as the leader can focus on the other things that you need to do. Doesn't mean that you won't help. It doesn't mean that you won't stay on top of it. But you will fail as a leader if you believe you have to personally do everything that's important. You have to personally do everything that's important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:58) Yes. Absolutely. I mean, you kind of learn that really fast as an entrepreneur.

(Rob Thomas at 00:40:04) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:05) Right? Like, it's tough. Have you ever start, well, I guess you've been at IBM, but you've started businesses or been a part of starting businesses. I mean, you sound very entrepreneurial when I talk to you.

(Rob Thomas at 00:40:15) I study that a lot, so I know nothing in the real world. So I admire people like yourself that have done that. Because I think it develops a level of scrappiness and tenaciousness that sometimes is missing from people that have only lived in the corporate world, if you will. So I couldn't possibly say I've been in your shoes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:39) Yeah. I heard Elon Musk describe it once as staring into the abyss and eating glass, and I was like, yeah. That's close. I started the business, this isn't my first business, but I started it right when I was having my first kid, like two months before she was born, and I had a new wife, kid, and I just was like, all right, well, here we go again. Let's do this hard thing right now. I mean, it doesn't really, it's just hard. It's like, there's only a certain level of hard, there's like maximum hard, by the way. So there's maximum hard and there's maximum pain, and, you know, you know what those are like and then it's just like, okay, it only gets that painful and it only gets that hard. And then it's just up to you. Like how, it's like working out too or fitness or anything. Very, very similar. It's like, how long are you going to spend in that hard space? Or how long are you willing to spend in that hard space? But I liked what you were talking about, about focus earlier and knowing that one thing, because that's something that's hard to teach because it's so context and situationally dependent to figure out what that hill is and to understand it. And so when things really clicked for me, when I heard this phrase simplify to multiply, And I think it was like a Tim Ferriss thing. And I was just like, what's the most important thing that has to be done? Whether it's today or in the quarter or in the year. And then I heard Bezos right after that say that the things you're seeing this year are from four years ago. And he's like, I'm living five years into the future now because I can. And so listening to how these people think about planning and then having the faith to do that are two separate things. But if you do it, if you plan in advance and, like, I saw you had a rule on there, like, a minimum of three years, it is so important because I made these mistakes. Like, in your writing, you say, you know, by changing direction and doing these things, you kind of lie to yourself, like, oh, new information, got to change the path, new information. But what you did in your writing and your sort of checklist guide to general management, which you showed this very important fact that I learned in a very painful way, is that when you're doing those things and you think you're doing the right thing by changing, you're jerking your team around, and it's like they're in a boat in a storm and you're just going to batter them up and bruise them while you think you're doing the best thing.

(Rob Thomas at 00:43:09) And it's a tough lesson to learn, man. It is. And if the team is being jerked around changing directions like that, you're going nowhere except for maybe in circles. So you've got to have commitment and clarity on a direction, which can't change every week. And then you've got to set your priorities to make sure that it's aligned in that direction. So, one of the, setting priorities, I'll tell you, here's one thing that is so simple in concept that I think is incredibly hard to do. Every Monday, write down on paper what are the three most important things that you have to accomplish that week. I can't tell you how hard it is to actually do that because you actually sit down with a blank sheet of paper. You're like, well, that's important. You'll probably end up with a list of like 15 things. You're like, well, that's not that important. Well, if I can do that now and knock it out in ten minutes, is it really one of the three most important things? Like, really thinking about what are the three most important things that will have an impact and an outcome? Is actually not nearly as easy to do as it sounds.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:20) Oh, I've, yes. Okay. So we had this idea when we, after the podcast started to take off a little bit, we ended up creating a leadership company where we did leader bits with these leadership challenges that we would do once a week and you would put them out there and people would join and they'd pay for them and go on. And what we realized is, or like the point of all of that, and the business model ended up changing to where we were just a leadership training for companies. Like they would pick a leadership program. They would do ten weeks of challenges. Because what would happen is we found it's the hardest thing in the world to just be consistent. So even if you're only doing like a ten minute entry, right, a ten minute entry, but you have to do it every single week, the probability of your failure exponentially increases the farther it goes, it just becomes hard to do. And it was fascinating. I would interview and talk to these people too. Like, some people who had done them longer than others to really understand if the product or how it was working. And they're like, yeah, if you do it, it's beneficial. I'm like, okay. So I have a product that's equivalent to working out. Like, if you work out, you will get the results. Right? It's just a lot of effort over a very long period of time.

(Rob Thomas at 00:45:33) Yep. Look. I think it was the Warren Buffett quote that, you know, the greatest invention of mankind is compounding. I think I butchered that quote. But the general idea was trusting compounding, which is just stick with it, do a little bit every day. Like, that is the superpower. And, you know, it's like the, uh, like January 2 when suddenly the workout room's packed again, and then by January 15, it's kind of empty again. Like, it's because people go too hard. Like, they show up on January 2, and they just kill themselves. And, like, that's not what it's about. Just do a little bit every day. Do a little bit every week. The power of compounding can't be compared to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:16) Yeah, we call it leveraging the compounding nature of time over here. It's like one of our things that we talk about a lot because like you said, it was something that Warren Buffett says, but then it happens with how you spend your time. Like, it's not just like a financial thing. And also while you're waiting for these results, while you're letting it compound, right? The mindset is important too, because if you're expecting results in two weeks, like I want to go to the gym, I'm losing 15 pounds too. But if you go into it saying this is going to take me five years, it's going to take me five years to get to where I want to be physically. And the way I'm going to start is by driving to the gym and sitting in the parking lot for five minutes, but I have, or I'm sitting in the parking lot and then waiting an hour and then I get bored of sitting in the parking lot and then I end up going in and walking just so I'm not sitting in the car and then I end up getting a trainer and then I, it's like a five year path and just execute consistently in that expectation. And that's, I think, one of the things touches back a little bit to the career path. I think setting expectations with career paths is super important too because you don't want them to just give up. Right?

(Rob Thomas at 00:47:24) You got to have an ambitious goal. If you don't have any idea where you're going, then who knows where you'll end up? But then you do have to commit to consistent process, consistent discipline. What is it going to take to get better every day? Like, those are the things that I think about. And I think as people think about the arc of their careers, there's probably three skills that I would say are the most magical skills for a person to have. And it's not, it's not hard to describe, but it's hard to do. One is you've got to be a great communicator. Whether it's, you know, how you write, how you talk to others in a meeting, how you share your ideas, whatever it may be, presenting. You've got to be a great communicator. That's a magical skill. You've got to be able to work with others, which is not, I mean, the irony is we go through school, and it's called cheating to work with others in school. Right? So then you get in the workforce, and suddenly the magical skill is can you actually work with others? I think that's the second one. Third one, actually, for me is reading. I know not everybody likes reading, but there's other ways to, well, first of all, read stuff that you like, then you'll like it, and then you'll see where it takes you. But if you don't want to read, listen to podcasts or something else. But reading is a magical skill because, and I told people this over and over again, if you just go, you've got a meeting on a topic or a presentation. If you just go read the three best books ever written on that topic, you're going to be smarter than 90% of the people in the room because they probably didn't take the time to do that. So, look, if you're a great communicator, you're great working with others, you spend a lot of time reading, you're pretty much unstoppable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:18) Okay. So I want to, I want to first of all, yes. I love that. And when you were talking about the compounding time, right, and like, let's say you're trying to work on these becoming a great communicator or working with others and reading and just putting that thirty minute chunk in your schedule and just letting it become part of your identity. This is someone who I am. I'm someone who invests time in my communication skills or reading. And then let's say, so you do all of that, right? And you do that for a year or two, and you notice a drastic difference in the improvement in these three areas, and maybe even your coworkers and leaders know, people around you. Okay. Then you go off to do some big goal, and you apply the same principles. Right? And you get the big goal, you get a goal that you thought would take you twenty years, you get it in about two, maybe three years, right, then you get kind of depressed because here I'm sharing, this is like a personal thing. It came out differently, but I'll share the details if you want. But so I accomplished this thing I thought would take me twenty years, this podcast, because it was my dream to talk to the greatest technology leaders in the world building the coolest stuff. And that was this thing I planned and set out to take twenty years. And then it happened within like two or three years. And the weirdest thing happened. I got kind of depressed. And then I realized that I can do anything if I work hard at it and apply these principles. And I couldn't figure out what to do, you know, what to do with this new, you called it a superpower, earlier. Like, what do you do with this superpower? And then, so I was, so I'm curious, cause I was asking around and I've figured it out for the time being, cause this happened to me about six months ago, eight months ago. But I'm curious, do you see this happen in some of your high performing executives? Like, do you see them hit these goals, apply these principles, and then just kind of get lost for a minute?

(Rob Thomas at 00:51:19) I definitely have. We watched the movie, the Pixar, the new Pixar movie Soul with my wife and kids. I don't know if you've seen it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:28) Yeah, we just saw it like a couple weeks ago or when it came out.

(Rob Thomas at 00:51:32) Pixar's gone from talking toys to movies that make adults ponder their whole life. But the thing that stuck with me was, you know, the guy wants to play jazz, wants to play with stars, and then he finally gets to do it. And then he walks off the stage, he's like, "Is that it?" And she's like, "Yeah, now we go to the next city." And it was like the thing he thought was going to be amazing, he realized it was just another step. And I think that's kind of the whole game, right? Which is you have to have goals, but then you've also got to be able to find what is that next level. The thing that's the most painful for me, but I also like, is when you kind of think you have it going and you think you're doing the right things, then you meet somebody and you're like, "Wow, that person's like 10x in that area to me." Because then it completely changes what you thought the bar was. And so I think that, look, there's always another level. So when I see people that kind of hit that wall that you're describing, you just got to coax them to keep their eyes open, stay curious. They'll realize that there's another level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:45) Yeah, and then just figuring out what that next big goal is. And so what I took from that experience was, as I'm approaching the goal, the best I can figure it out if I'm getting there, figure out what the next move is before the accomplishment, like actually the realization of the accomplishment actually takes place. That way I can just go right to that next one. But luckily I'm pretty good about, if I feel a certain way, how to flip it around pretty quickly. So it doesn't last for weeks or anything like that. It's just like, "Oh, I feel kind of off now. I've got to go talk to a bunch of people and figure out what to do." But really the act of the growth and doing something big and amazing with a group of people and creating that change and being useful to the world and helping others, like all of that stuff is the best parts of it, right? The achieving the end result is, like, it's something that's necessary. You have to have that flag that you're going after or that hill you're going to take, but the best part is the entire experience along the way.

(Rob Thomas at 00:53:52) The thing that changed my whole perspective on leadership was something that Clay Christensen wrote in—I think the book was called How Will You Measure Your Life, something like that. And he's got this paragraph where he talked about a manager that was interacting with the employee. Something didn't go right, so they kind of berated the person. He said he couldn't stop thinking about how she then drove home, and she was probably depressed and she was probably down, which means she probably wasn't supportive of her kids. And it was just kind of illustrating that the impact that you can have on somebody's life at work can completely change their kids' lives potentially. And it kind of made me think, like, there has to be more than just building a great business. If—and I kind of decided at that point, part of my job is going to be, can I have a positive impact on others, as opposed to just can we build a great business? Look, we want to build a great business. It's our job to build a great business, but you can do that and also have a positive impact on people's lives. And when I read that, and I'm not describing it as well as it was written, but it really kind of struck me as, "Yeah, that's actually what the real focus should be." And so I try to keep that in mind all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:19) That's—I love that, because it's like ample—so you as a leader, so people who are listening who are leading teams, the way that they interact with their direct reports has an amplifying effect across their families and their kids and everything in life.

(Rob Thomas at 00:55:36) Right. And all they're going to remember about you is how did you make them feel in the time that they were working with you. That's all they'll remember.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:46) That is so true. The first time I heard that, somebody says people don't remember what you say, they remember how you made them feel. And I just instantly—some things you just know in your core of yourself are true because you can think back and you're like, you remember all these conversations you had, but you don't remember the words of the conversation. You just kind of remember how they made you feel and what the outcome was.

(Rob Thomas at 00:56:09) You're right. And I think—well, I tend to be a very direct communicator. And so I know sometimes when I start working with people I haven't worked with before, they're kind of maybe taken aback. But I think I believe they learn over time that it comes from a good place, which is, look, I want you to be great. Because if you're great, then we're going to be great. And so I think being a direct communicator helps with that, but it also kind of keeps me—the story I shared keeps me in check because I do realize that ultimately what I say is going to have an impact on what people do when they leave the office or when they turn off Zoom. So that's a pretty big responsibility. And, look, we all have that responsibility regardless of what our job is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:54) Yeah. Regardless of whether we realize it's our responsibility or not, it's still there. So some people will hear this and be like, "Woah, yeah." Fearlessness. I think a couple more things. Do you have five more minutes or are we hard stop?

(Rob Thomas at 00:57:04) Yeah, we're good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:04) Okay. People think leaders are fearless, right? That's something I hear all the time. People will say that to me. They're like, "I don't know how you do it." And they think that I'm, like, absent the fear, and I'm most definitely not. Like, I know the feeling of fear. What are your thoughts on that?

(Rob Thomas at 00:57:25) Everybody's human. I think people—they see people on TV or they read about people in a newspaper and they think they're superhuman. They're not. Everybody has the same feelings. I forget what the line was. It's about courage, which is—you know, having courage is not that you're not scared. It's that you're scared, but then you keep going forward. And, look, everybody's human, so I think everybody has the same feelings. I do think teams will take on the psychology of the leader. And so it is the job of the leader—if something looks really hard, it's your job to act like it's a piece of cake. Because if you say this is impossible, then the team's going to take on that view that it's impossible. So you do have to act like it's a piece of cake even if it's not. That doesn't mean you don't acknowledge, "Hey, here's where it can be difficult. Here are the things we're going to have to get over." But a leader has to convey confidence without a doubt. It kind of goes back to the coaching analogy. Nobody ever won a game by the coach saying, "We're probably going to lose. Here's all the reasons we're going to lose. We're not as good as them." You have to project confidence. But that doesn't mean that you don't have the same feelings anybody else does. But your job as a leader is to convey confidence and to lay out the reasons why you're confident, a reason for optimism. I think that's pretty critical.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:57) Yeah. It's not fake confidence because if you have less experience or no experience, I could see someone doing that. But I'm slow to confidence. Like, I happen to know this about myself. It takes me a long time to build confidence, but once I have it—like, I'm slower than the other kids, but once I get it, like, it's there. Like, it's just a core trait in the area that I've achieved the confidence in. And so, you know, having my first area of mastery and then a second, then I learned how long it takes to achieve that for myself. And then a second one and a third one, basically getting to the point where you have enough experience mixed with, you know, reading those books and understanding what do the experts argue about at the top, because nobody agrees across anything. But that confidence of doing difficult things—like, if you're used to doing difficult things, if you understand that, you know, you're always kind of fearful, but you push through it and it works sometimes and it doesn't work the other, but you have to try. And for it to work, you have to go in believing that it'll work. Like, that is so important. Like, you have to go in believing that it's going to work and have the experience that you're going to have that dip that you're going to have to push through.

(Rob Thomas at 01:00:11) And I think, look, when things go wrong, how you react as the leader is going to determine how the team acts, right? If you turn that into, "Well, you know, that was horrible. Not sure what we're going to do." You panic. You start ranting and raving. Then you're setting the wrong tone. And so, again, the most important thing you can do is to convey confidence and acknowledge reality. You've got to do both, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:43) Yes, man. I could talk to you all day, and I subscribed today, by the way, to your—it's a newsletter. It's called The Mentor. Can you tell me what that's about and how people can subscribe?

(Rob Thomas at 01:00:54) Sure. So this may not be the answer you're looking for, but anytime I see new technology or tools, I'm always kind of curious and I want to try them. So it was about this time last year, I saw that this company, Substack, that I'd never heard of, raised, I think, $30 or $40 million, and it was like newsletters. I was like, "How did somebody—how did somebody raise $30 million for newsletters? I don't even know what that means." So I went on to Substack just to figure out what it means. And so I set this up and I called it The Mentor. And I said, "I'm going to share each month—I'll share the three best things I've read about careers, building your skills, personal development," a lot of the topics we talked about. And so I started that last January. So every month, an email comes out. It's pretty short. It's like half a page, and here's the three best things I read somewhere on that. And I got a lot of positive feedback on it. So a lot of people have subscribed, which has been great. I've gotten pointers. I've gotten suggestions. So I've learned a lot in the process. Learned how to use Substack, so that's been fun. So it's been great. So I appreciate you doing that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:05) Awesome. Thank you, Rob. Keep being awesome, my friend. We'll talk soon.

(Rob Thomas at 01:02:08) Alright, guys. Take care. Have a great week. See you.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:14) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or a 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.