Arthur Hu - CIO of Lenovo

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(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) I'm happy to ask our guests any questions you have and bring you as much value as possible. Now speaking of value, get ready because today, we are talking to Art Hu, the CIO of Lenovo, and we discussed Lenovo's transition from product-centric to customer-centric, creating an environment where your people are empowered and redefining what hands-on means as you progress into leadership. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Art Hu at 00:01:20) Hey, Joel. Evening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:21) Hey, buddy. How are you?

(Art Hu at 00:01:22) I am well. Which time zone are you in?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:26) Right now, I'm in EST.

(Art Hu at 00:01:29) All right. Very good. So evening your time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:32) Yeah. It's evening. It's early morning for you, correct?

(Art Hu at 00:01:35) Indeed it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:38) Do you do a morning routine? You run? How do you get prepared for the day?

(Art Hu at 00:01:42) Depends on where I am. If I'm in Beijing, then I just get to the office early before all the traffic starts, and we'll call that the routine that I'm quite happy to start with you with. When I'm in other places, it's a little different. I tend to do my exercise later. How about you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:58) Yeah. I do a 5:30 or 6:00 AM run, and then I make some breakfast and get to the office around 7:30. And then I'll take a break around 2:00 and go to the gym three times a week, not every day. And then I come back, family time, and then I'm here till about 8:00, 8:30.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:22) All right. So spending my thirties, all the energy. Whenever I listen to the individuals who are in their sixties, they're saying spend your energy while you can, and so I take that advice to heart.

(Art Hu at 00:02:36) I was actually reading a book around sleep interestingly. Right? And I think the aspiration that we should all have energy throughout our entire lives and hopefully not just when you're in your thirties because that's pretty depressing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:49) Yeah. I've been using this app called Sleep Cycle. And it listens to how you breathe when you sleep, and then it monitors your exercise. So it'll—the idea is that it'll create connections between what you do throughout the day, what you eat, and then how you sleep.

(Art Hu at 00:03:03) Yeah. It's amazing. Is it on a tracker or a wrist or is it on your phone?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:09) No. So it's on your phone, and you put it on your nightstand, and it has to be plugged in, and then it just listens to your breathing. But it works. I started watching the graph and adjusting my data, and then I found out if I added the run to my mornings, then I sleep better. That's just for myself, and so I really found a lot of benefit in it.

(Art Hu at 00:03:34) That's some pretty hardcore—I mean, I know a lot of friends also. That's a lot of hardcore digitizing your life. I haven't let data get into my sleep. I'm a little bit more old school in that respect of do I feel rested when I wake up is my measure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:48) Yes. So what it does, and this is why I like it, and I don't digitize my whole life. I try to disconnect from technology as much as possible. I'm big in nature. And what this does is—you set a window that you want to wake up. So I say, all right, here's a 30-minute window, and based on my sleeping pattern, it'll wake me up at the most opportune time for me to feel rested.

(Art Hu at 00:04:11) Ah, okay. So that seems a little bit less intrusive. Okay. I was glad to hear you say that because I also find it slightly ironic that people want to digitize their sleep, and they're telling me they're looking at their smartphone at night and trying to optimize. And I'm like, well, you know, the radiation of the light from the smartphone actually keeps you awake longer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:27) Yeah. So I do the whole hour before, no electronics, and because it's that blue light, you know. We're humans. The sky is bright and blue in the morning, and that's going to wake us up.

(Art Hu at 00:04:40) Exactly. So this is the podcast, by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:40) Oh, I apologize. It's not just small talk. Hello. So I just wanted you to know that. And I'm really excited to be talking to you. I love your history. I heard great things from Jackie. She says she had been speaking for you and that you were very, very bright. And I can obviously see this here also by your notes and what you've been able to accomplish. McKinsey & Company, come on. How did that happen?

(Art Hu at 00:05:05) McKinsey actually was very much of an accident. And so I was a software developer. I have a computer science background, and it was really—I think you're going to laugh, but I think it was literally free food. Right? So as a poor college student, you jump at any opportunities. You have something nicer than you would normally have, like cold pizza, leftovers, what have you. And so I think it was literally one of my friends had said, oh, McKinsey is having a dinner tonight. Why don't you come? And I hadn't been invited, but I sort of tagged along.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:40) And got out of it.

(Art Hu at 00:05:41) And it just took a life of its own from there. Strangely enough—strangely now in retrospect, but not so strangely at the time—I had no idea who McKinsey was or why I would have wanted to talk to them beforehand. So what are the serendipities of life?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:57) Yes. Sometimes, you know, I'm always open to new opportunity, and I work hard. And when I found out that it was literally that simple—you work very hard, you continuously learn, you stay open to new opportunity. You take care of yourself. You follow through. You do these basic things that we all know we should do, and then life really changes if you really focus on them.

(Art Hu at 00:06:20) Yes. I know. I think that's also proven to be true in my experience as well. And then the only thing I would add on top of that is a dash of luck. Right? And you're smart. You work hard. I think you're more likely to, but I think luck and serendipity, as I mentioned, play an underappreciated role.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:38) 100%. I fully agree. Looking back on my timeline, those pivotal moments that really changed the course were just one and one and infinite. It was just, you know, so I just get excited thinking about it. Yeah. It's like a movie. It's like those key points in the movie, the highlight. Right?

(Art Hu at 00:06:57) Yeah. Exactly. Or it's where the plot really—it has a fork in the road and you have to choose.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:01) Are you in China right now?

(Art Hu at 00:07:03) Yes. Exactly. So it's 7:00 AM here, bright and early.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:07) My sister just moved back. She spent five years there in Shenzhen.

(Art Hu at 00:07:10) Fabulous. I'm sure—I'm not sure what she was doing there or the energy, but I think it's a place that's just brimming with new ideas and the collision in a positive way of many new ways of thinking with existing. And so I know the city itself is full of energy. And it's always—it's different every time you go back, especially if you know, it was more than a year or two between when you visit. The change is very palpable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:36) Yeah. And she would—that's how I learned about WeChat several years ago. It was through being able to communicate with her and she would send me all her hiking pictures and how beautiful everything was and the nature out there. It was amazing.

(Art Hu at 00:07:50) Excellent. Do you still use WeChat now that she's moved back?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:53) Yes. Because now I have friends all over the world from the show. So, yeah, I pretty much—anyone—no one in America really uses it. None of my American friends mention it at all. They just are all basically on text message and group chats. And then every other person in the world is WeChat.

(Art Hu at 00:08:15) Exactly. You'll have to add me, and I'll have to add you after this chat, and we'll hook up afterwards.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:21) Oh, absolutely. So tell me a little bit about how you got involved with Lenovo.

(Art Hu at 00:08:27) Yeah. So Lenovo actually comes out of the earlier—just what we talked about and when I joined McKinsey. So I was fortunate enough to be able to work in multiple places around the world, in Silicon Valley, in Europe, in China. And at some point early in my career, I decided also to come to China to work. And so I spent time in Hong Kong right across the harbor and right across the way from Shenzhen.

(Art Hu at 00:08:51) And so as luck would have it, once again, as I got towards what was then the end of my tenure with McKinsey, though I didn't know it at the time, Lenovo was actually one of my clients that I was serving. And through a combination of circumstances, the time was right when the company was looking to make some pretty major changes in how it thought about business transformation and how it thought about using technology to move forward. And so I jumped at the opportunity to make the shift, which I think is classic for many of moving from giving advice to a company to trying your hand at owning something on behalf of a company and driving progress from another perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:36) But your background had totally prepared you for this.

(Art Hu at 00:09:40) Yes and no. Right? I think, again, it's one of those things in hindsight where you say, oh, right. All those things fit into pieces, and I can use all the skills that I built up. But at the time, it certainly felt jumping into something entirely new. I think for me, Lenovo's culture is very global. Right? Its leadership team is very global, and that certainly helps my acclimation. What I probably wasn't as prepared for, right, because I think when you have a good technical and a good engineering background and you also—my time at McKinsey had helped round me out in terms of business. What I was really unprepared for when I joined Lenovo was that shift, right, that shift in mindset of moving from an advisor to someone who is actually—the buck stops with you. There's nobody else. Right? When you look around, there's nobody else that's going to be accountable if something doesn't get done, right, on the downside. Or if something does get done, then, hey. It was me. And so that was—again, it sounds simple in concept, but I think grasping that took me actually quite some time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:49) Now when you got the opportunity to move to China and work there with Lenovo—like you said, they're a global company. Right? And did you have to learn the language, or did you already know it?

(Art Hu at 00:11:01) Right. So that's a slightly separate story by itself. So I effectively had to learn it. I actually came to China with McKinsey at the time, and I had transferred with them to Hong Kong. And I grew up in the US, and so I did not—while I could hear and listen to and understand a little bit of the language, I guess it was a different time than today. Right? Today, it seems very strange because I see—I live in the San Francisco Bay Area currently. And more often than not, all many of our friends and many of their families, they're sending their kids to learn Chinese on the weekend or even Mandarin immersion school. Right? But that's totally not how it was when I grew up where I think I felt a lot of pressure to just learn English, and why did I need Chinese, and China was this other country that wasn't really on the radar. So I didn't have much of a foundation. But when I came over to China to work, it pretty quickly became apparent to me that being of Chinese descent, so I'm Chinese American, being of Chinese descent, but not speaking the language in China is not a recipe for success—

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:09) Right. That's difficult.

(Art Hu at 00:12:11) —at all. So I had to essentially go on a crash course and figure it out very quickly how to pick it up. And so I think in this case, a combination of urgent need plus the right environment really helps light a fire under you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:27) Is there a big working difference? So I work with all sorts of companies, you know, enterprise, small business, and here in the United States, and then some in Sweden, and some in Brazil. But is there—I noticed that there's some culture differences, but there are some really strong trends that—everyone wants to be productive and make things happen and push the world forward and do better for the next generation. Do you find that everyone can collect around those commonalities?

(Art Hu at 00:12:57) Yeah. I think, actually, I would agree with that statement pretty strongly. Right? Having been on multiple—having viewed this issue from multiple sides, I think the so-called cultural aspect of differences gets overplayed some. Right? Not that there aren't differences. There are very real differences, of course, in culture and how people behave. But I found variation to be more on a company-by-company on their culture. Right? And so I don't—I think people sometimes use it as—it's like, oh, the culture in X country or the culture in X—is different, and that's why. And, again, it has a contributing factor, but it's never quite been that simple in my experience because it's—I guess it's just the problem of reductionism. Even in China, right, with so many companies, you're, by definition, going to have a constellation of cultures and different styles and ways of working. And so culture is one contributor, but I found more meaningful differences, both having been at Lenovo for quite some time in variety of roles, but also having seen many dozens of companies in my tenure with McKinsey that how a company works and its culture is actually pretty specific and plays as strong, if not a stronger role in how to get things done. So that's why I think some of the universals around trying to drive change, to make a better future, to use technology in more interesting ways are starting points from which in commonality that which you can build from.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:21) I love it. And you're very well spoken. I've done 145 interviews in the past eight months, and—

(Art Hu at 00:14:29) That's quite prolific, by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:31) Thank you. I was doing three a day, and then I lost my voice. And so I had to back it up, and then we backed it down to—once we really gained some traction in the market, we set it up to just one or two days a week. And it's just been absolutely phenomenal what just an incredible amount of hard work will do. I guess it's almost like for me, it's pushing it. It's like, all right. So I work very hard, and I get the results, and that's incredibly motivating. So that's—

(Art Hu at 00:15:01) I think that's the right virtuous cycle to get into. Right? Hopefully, it's not I work really hard, and I'm hating every second, but I guess I have more listeners now. Right? I think it sounds really positive to them. And I've certainly sampled—you have almost—I think you're into triple digits or almost triple digits now in terms of the number of interviews and conversations like this that you've had. Right? And I think it's a terrific breadth of topics and discussion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:26) And that's the reason why I do it. So for me, the thing that gets me excited is being able to bring the value. I have this folder in my phone called Positive, and I take screenshots when everybody sends me thank you notes or tags my book online. And it's just like, this is why I'm doing it. I'm doing it because I wanted other people to have the information that I have so they can avoid my mistakes and make better mistakes. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:54) Right?

(Art Hu at 00:15:55) No, and I totally admire that because I think that's very much around the hacker ethos. One of the things that we're trying to do and I'm trying to do with my team is also to get a stronger engineering culture in place. Right? It, for historical reasons, we're not where I would like us to be on that dimension of how we do. But I think what you described is really a macro scale of building up a culture of sharing. Right? Because I think traditionally, as part of the hacker, it's sharing what you've known so that people can actually—and it's very much the spirit behind open source as well. Right? That's doing it, you know, at the code scale. This is much more an integrative, right, lessons learned and patterns of how to apply technology scale. And so I think that's really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:40) Yeah. And then you brought up a great point. Right? That's the world I grew up in. I grew up in, I could go download some code and then improve it and then share my contributions with others and continually snowball this into something we're all working on together. And that's one of the beautiful things about modern technology. It's really leveling the playing field to you have a brain, and you can train it, and you can take it as far as you want. And now we have this medium in which we can engage, interact, do business, and it's all up to how much desire we have.

(Art Hu at 00:17:16) Right. And I think the fluency and part of why this is important is because I think people's fluency with these concepts—right? You can go from open source at the code level to having test levels, having architecture level, to having then adoption level patterns that you apply. And I think the larger the number of people in the community who understand and engage in that, I think, obviously, the greater the value. Right? So as more and more people become fluent in these concepts, that sort of becomes that cycle that you started to describe just a few moments.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:46) Yeah. It's like a giant computer system. The more processors we have involved, the better chance of survival, the more creativity, just the better all around and more resilient we'll be. Exactly. Okay. I'm curious to know about your style of leadership. You're obviously leading a large technology company or division of a technology—it's all technology, technology leadership. Right? So I'm curious to know about what you look for in other leaders that are around you and work on your team, and what stands out to you about great leaders.

(Art Hu at 00:18:22) On this one, a while ago, I read the book The Hard Thing About Hard Things, which I hope many people are familiar with. And one of the things that really struck me from the book was this notion of, you know, peacetime and wartime generals. And so, again, I think there's, of course, some commonality. I think you should be inspirational. You should lead by example. At the end of the day—and I'll come back to the wartime versus peacetime general in a second—but I think, fundamentally, leadership is about getting things done, right, which is an outcome orientation. And so in that sense, I'm very open to whatever style that you want to bring to the game and to work, as long as you are achieving the results. Now, obviously, I think there's going to be some, we'll call them boundaries, right, guardrails, you know, ethically, morally, and that I think we assume. But within those very broad parameters then, style wise, I think I'm also of the mindset that diversity is important. You don't want a set of clones. You don't want people who are too susceptible to groupthink. And so I don't really have too much in terms of preference. Right? I think what I look for is fundamentals. Right? So, for example, if I'm bringing you on to lead a large engineering organization, but, you know, you can't tell me the difference syntactically between Python and C# or C++, you're probably not the right person. Right? But in leadership style wise, what's most important is your ability to engage the team in a way that delivers results. And what's interesting is I actually find myself—I have to force myself to overcome my inherent personal preferences. Right? Because I think personally, I'd be comfortable if everyone kind of thought like me, talked like me, and just had the same thought patterns. And so I actually consciously try to bring people on who I think, how do we say this? I think would produce the right kind of cognitive dissonance. You don't want people whose values are opposed to yours or you want to go this way, and actually they want to go the other way. Right? That's not going to be constructive. But I think if, you know, your values and your outlook and the direction are aligned, right, then I'm very flexible, and I try to look at what the outcomes are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:57) That reminds me of my wife. Like, we have the same values, and we're on the same track, but she just has this amazing ability—

(Art Hu at 00:21:03) Comment. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:06) She has this amazing ability to see what I don't see. Like, she just—an event happens and she just has a totally different view of it, but it's also logical. I'm like, that makes sense too. I get how you saw that, but it was just so—I like how you described it. Yeah. Those are the—

(Art Hu at 00:21:25) Oh, right. And then just so it wasn't randomly bringing up the wartime versus peacetime general. And I think that reflects it because I think the best leaders can actually decide when to be which one. Yes. Which is—and it's not that you're all—because there's situation, then it can change depending even on the situation that you're dealing with. Right? One of the things I feel like as a CIO, every day is a roller coaster. Not in a bad way, but there's, right, there's incredible highs, and you can be talking about really what's aspirational and how we should frame a particular issue for the company or how we want to approach a new technology. And the next minute, it might be, oh, the server broke. Right? Let's—Yeah. And those require very different things. Right? So if you're thinking about strategy on a topic and longer term thinking, it's a very different mindset, then we better go—let's go look at the data center really quickly and run over and see what's going on, right, and why is our private cloud down. Right? And so I think to be able—and that's, I think, one of the hallmarks, which is being flexible to be able to switch between, right, when you need to lead to drive change versus when you need to step back and let teams that are more on a steady state operate well versus when you personally need to, you know, engage at a very different level. Right? Because I think, you know, what I don't like is people who think, oh, I'm the leader. I'm here to preside. I'm here to give reviews, and I will look at and I'll approve your decisions. And that might be the answer sometimes, but that can't be the default or the sole operating model. Interesting. I was coming off a call with my teams. We're in a bit of an urgent situation that needs remediation. And I said, guys, look. If I need to come in and write test scripts and hit the test button with you so we can finish this weekend, that's what we'll do. Right? And that's very different than, okay. How do I get up in front of 10,000 people at the company kickoff and talk about how we're doing on digitalization? Right? Totally different things. Right? Totally different approach. But I think just some small examples because I think that's very illustrative of you need to have very different engagement modes at different times.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:38) No. And that just shows the dynamic qualities because nothing comes naturally. And mastery doesn't come naturally of anything. Right? You have to put effort into it. So the ability for you to switch between these different modes, you've had to learn in these different areas, and that means you've literally spent time dedicated to becoming better and improving in that area, and that shows a lot of drive and self-direction. And that's one of the best, you know, or recurring quality in all the leaders.

(Art Hu at 00:24:12) No. Yeah. So I think that range is important. Right? Because I think—and that's another way. I think it's just a fancy way all what we were just talking. I was saying outcome orientation. Right? If you're the best resource at a particular time to do a certain thing on the critical path, then you figure out how to get it done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:28) Yeah. I was talking with the CTO of Williams Sonoma. They also do Pottery Barn. They're actually headquartered in San Francisco, and he came on. We were talking. He had this amazing way. He beautifully described outcome-based approaches, and I was like, I'm team Yasir. Like, I love the way that you described that, and I'm all about the outcome too. But you get such different results when you are outcome driven versus activity driven.

(Art Hu at 00:24:54) Yes. And it's easy to fall into that, and I do think that's one of the things that I also have to actively try to fight against. And the larger the company, the easier the tendency because it's just so big and there's the span, especially globally where, yeah, if you're a time zone away, you're twelve, like we are for this conversation. Yeah. And you can imagine trying to fix that issue or finish a build with your engineer. Something happens. You're like, oh, but you just went to sleep. I guess I'll talk to him in eight hours. Well, you just lost a day. But, right, I think large organizations have a tendency, if not checked, to go into this process orientation. I came off of another meeting yesterday—not yesterday, but very recently—where the team, they had the totally wrong outcome, but they spent all their time trying to justify to me why they followed the steps they were supposed to. And it was much more important that they'd done—they showed me, like, the stack of paper. They're like, well, I went to step A, and then I was supposed to talk to person B. And I said, you know what? From—and that's one of the big changes we're trying to drive. I said, this is the wrong result. It didn't matter. Right? Well, let's start with that. And so rather than trying to justify why you shouldn't be blamed, let's just—I don't care about blame. Let's go fix the issue. And that was—it was just interesting. Right? Because that required—it sounds so trivial, and it sounds so obvious. But, you know, having to spend energy on that, I think, is important to signal to the teams that's how you put it into practice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:12) Yeah. And then as you transition from engineer to leadership, you're constantly having to reallocate your energy from being completely technical to just a little bit of people stuff, to a little bit more people stuff, fifty-fifty split, and then you continue on into the C-level where you're not writing code as a daily practice even though you maybe can. Right? And so I'm curious what your advice is for individuals that are new leaders or beginning that transition.

(Art Hu at 00:26:42) Yeah. So I think a couple of things. The first is to really—and I think there's different—as you outlined very clearly, I think that's a good way of thinking about it. I think there's a difference between being a new first line, you know, engineering leader versus a second line versus that you become more senior, and then maybe become a CXO at some point. So I think on the earlier end, as a first line manager, the major difference—because at that point, you should still, in my view, be spending a significant amount of your time actually with the team and contributing. But then as a first line engineering manager, I think it's important that you figure out how to help your other engineers be productive. And let me just do a quick sidebar on this because—please—here, and it's very important here that you have to figure out if that's what you'd like to do. Right? Because, certainly, I've made my fair share of mistakes in saying, I had the classic, oh, you're a good technical lead. Let's make you an engineering manager. Right? And it was just oil and water. Right? The person—it just didn't fit. Right? The skills of—and the time you need to spend in coaching your team and helping get them aligned, right, and creating a better environment for them to work so that they can be more productive. Right? That just wasn't the sweet spot. And if it's not the sweet spot, it's a good time to figure that out. Right? And at that point, if your company doesn't have a good technical track for you to continue to advance, you should find a new company. Yes. So I think that's important. But I think expanding and—and then, as you said, shifting the mix of time to helping your team. Because at any level, I think part of being a leader is creating the right—helping your team understand the context and then creating the environment and the resources in which they feel empowered to go be successful. And so in shifting from an individual contributor to a first line engineering or first line manager, I think spending more time on the people aspect of helping them understand the strategy and helping coach them and develop them, I think, is important. And then I think as you continue down the spectrum, I think it's just a question of degree. Right? The time—the more senior you get and the more time that you have to spend about helping people understand the context. Right? Because I think it's very hard. Right? It's very easy to task master yourself. Right? I can go—yes—Asana or I can go on whatever. Pick whatever tool you would like, but it's very easy to task master yourself. Right? If you're driven, you can—and as you get more senior, you can maybe task master, right, your seven or eight developers, but as you get to second line manager and beyond, that's not possible anymore. And so I think it took me a while to realize, right, the importance of then creating that context and helping the team understand that. Because once they have that, they can connect their own internal drive to that, and that's the part of building the team. You want to have people who buy into that and are excited to go do that. And so I think the advice is first, spend time on the people because especially as you make the transition from individual contributor to manager because I think that's especially among some of my more techie developers, they have a view or they're coming from that background. Like, only code is value. Right? Managers suck. Right? And the more meetings you are, the more they—the more that you guys are PowerPoint lovers and the less time you spend actually doing real work. It's like, no, man. Actually, now coaching other developers, creating context so you can actually orchestrate and direct people's energies towards a goal that you couldn't code yourself no matter how much of a rock star you are becomes increasingly important. And I struggled with that because the less—it's not, I think, hands on. So for me, just maybe as how I thought about it, because I struggled with that as well. I'm like, wait a sec. I'm spending less time hands on, and I felt really guilty about that. And even it's something I struggle with now because my first instinct is let me go see the code or show me where it's broken or let's go write that page together, right, and let's sketch it out. And if I do that too much, then people are like, well, who's running the team? And who's steering the ship for the long term? And so it's something actually that's a continual battle for me as well.

(Art Hu at 00:30:46) And so one of the things that's helped me over time as I've transitioned into different roles has been to redefine what hands-on means. Right? If so, hands-on as individual contributors, you know, you do your check-in. You take it through the build pipeline or whatever you're doing. As a manager, hands-on means developing your people, making sure everyone's connected. Right? For me now, hands-on means shaping the culture and making sure people have as clear of a view and understanding of both the company strategy and how it connects to what we're trying to do. And so for me, I've had to redefine what hands-on means because otherwise, then I just lose control.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:25) I'm getting goosebumps. I'm getting goosebumps, man. It's beautiful. I love how we can be two humans having completely separate experiences, but then when we come together in this conversation, there's just, like, as you're speaking, I'm like, sing the song, man. You're doing—I love it. I love hearing it because, like a child, you go through it and you learn to walk, and then you're just excited when you run into other people who have traversed the stack as well. And yeah, I'm curious. Now you mentioned in the last discussion we just had about aligning with Lenovo's values and what you're trying to do. Can you give me a broad overview of where Lenovo's focus is and what the big missions are for the next foreseeable future?

(Art Hu at 00:32:13) Okay, absolutely. So I think Lenovo's on a very interesting journey, and we're at a very particular point in our history. So maybe we'll take it from a couple of directions. I think broadly, Lenovo is known for what I'm talking to you on now. ThinkPads and laptops and computers. And between us and HP, we've been number one in the computer industry for the last, I don't know, eight or nine years, give or take. But everyone knows PCs, or personal computers, as an industry is declining. Right? I think the last quarter was the first one in many, many quarters where we actually saw some growth. But broadly, it's stable to declining. And so what we've done is, for the last few years, we've been working on two major transformations as a company. The first major transformation is to go from a very product-centric company. Right? So we just sell the black boxes or we sell a desktop or an all-in-one, and it's a one-time sale. Thanks, Joel, for being a customer. I guess I'll see you in two point four years when you're gonna go, and hopefully you'll buy us again. And that was the model. We sold hardware, and we had a one-time sale. And so we want to go from something that's very product-centric into something that's much more consumer and customer-centric. And what that practically means is we have to—again, at the risk of sounding trivial—you have to know who your customer is. Right? So rather than, see you later, Mr. X, I don't need—I probably didn't even know you were Joel. I just sold it to the channel, and the channel sold it to you, or you got it from Best Buy. And now it's much more about, well, if you register for Lenovo ID, here's some interesting things we can offer you. We can keep your computer up to date. Right? We can make it less likely to fail. We can be proactive. And so I think just from a company that was very, you know, push with it—right? Here's our product. Push it into the market—into understanding what customers like. Right? So if you agree, Joel, we would collect anonymized data about how you use it so we can better optimize the screen, the battery, the touchpad, even the keyboard. So there's things like that, which are—there's a whole set of both technical changes as well as soft cultural changes about that major transition. And the second axis goes back to the issue of Lenovo being—right, especially three years ago, our revenue and our business groups were heavily skewed towards PC, which was a stable to slightly declining industry. And so the second major transformation as a company is then moving from a single business to a multi-business. So in 2014, so four years ago now, we did two acquisitions. One with the Motorola Mobility from Google, and so we acquired our global mobility platform, and we sell phones and mobile solutions. And the second one is we acquired the IBM x86 server business. So in those two steps, we went from one major business to three major businesses. Right? PCs to—and then mobile and data center group. And so that's also, I think, a very tricky transition for a company to navigate because it's going from undivided, 100% focus on something to now you have split focus as a company. And so we've had to engineer a lot of transformation around those dimensions. So that's broadly where we're coming from as a company and what we are focused on doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:21) So I'm just curious, being, you know, business nerd. Did those divisions remain operating independently, or did they come in under Lenovo? Like, how did that work?

(Art Hu at 00:35:34) So I think they are—it's a mix is, I guess, the best way to put it. If we think about the archetypes of how companies can come together, there's the holding company model, which says it may be a financial like, a conglomerate, right, which is I invest in you and I take a seat on your board and we appoint some board members and the chairman, and that's it. We have a financial stake. Right? The next level would be, kind of, right, the business runs itself, but the shared services around HR, around technology, around finance, we try to keep together. And then the other one is just full integration, which is, right, everything together. And so we've chosen something in the middle because I think we recognized that it's very different to run a phone business and a server business, which is now a data center business, not just servers. Most interestingly, again, most people don't know that, which is something we're working on. But we recognize that it's very different in running these businesses, so we didn't want to fully integrate and say, right, just run everything like we used to run the PC business. At the same time, there are—right? We do believe that there are certain things that we get scale out of. And so we do have shared platforms that we use because it makes sense. And just as an example, my teams, we build for Lenovo all of the e-commerce and online-based platform because it should be shared. Right? Why do I need two shopping carts? I don't need two configurators. I don't need baskets. I don't need two catalogs. A lot of those things that make sense to share, we share. And that's the beauty of technology because I think you can get some of the advantages of scale and sharing globally. And at the same time, you build the architecture in such a way that where the business teams need the differentiated services, they can still create that on top of the platform that you have. And so I think that's an interesting example of how kind of technology-layered thinking, abstraction, as well as notions of reuse actually play out writ large at the enterprise level because that's kind of the pattern other shared services follow as well. And as companies have become digital, I think you see a lot of the thinking kind of crossing over. Right? So microservices—I loved it. I was just having another discussion with some colleagues, and I saw a chart. It was talking about how we've been re-engineering some of our technology and our platforms to be much more microservice-oriented, right, because we're on a big kick to pursue greater agility, right, and fewer dependencies for the teams to move independently. And I thought, hey, that's a cool chart. I wonder which of my teams is presenting it. And it totally wasn't my team. Right? It was actually a chart from my team, but then I had the business teams trying to explain to other business teams what microservices was and why it was the greatest thing and why they were extremely excited about what it was gonna bring for their business. So, anyway, that was—it's a bit of a long answer, but it goes back to the question. Right, we just, you know, in terms of what we're up to and what we're changing, I do see a lot of technology concepts kind of finding their way into the mainstream in ways that the business is conscious of and maybe not so conscious of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:43) Oh, man. That was an amazing answer. Yes. Okay. So you mentioned something. You said that you guys are in the server business?

(Art Hu at 00:38:50) Yes. So we have three businesses now, which one is the personal computer, so PC and smart devices. That's more of our traditional, especially on the PC. The second one is mobility. So we sell Motorola brand and Lenovo brand. So Motorola brand phones globally and then Lenovo brand phones in China. And then we have a data center group, which offers data center solutions, including hardware, servers, storage, networking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:14) And you said that's the one that most people don't know about. Right?

(Art Hu at 00:39:18) Correct. Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:19) Okay. Now is it—so is it the hardware, or is it somewhat, like, can I go up and boot an instance, like, remotely, like an Amazon-type deal, or no?

(Art Hu at 00:39:29) So it's a good question. We're not a public cloud service provider, but we have our own private cloud, for example. And we also offer hybrid cloud technologies, right, IoT platform technology. So it's definitely not just server hardware. We've been making a significant expansion into offering full-stack solutions. For example, we are partnering with Amazon on their Greengrass IoT platform. Right? We're working with Microsoft on Azure Stack for hybrid cloud. And so we have hyperconverged offerings. We work with Nutanix, for example. And so we actually have, and have made a pretty explicit strategic focus to move away from selling, you know, one-way, two-way boxes, which, again, starts to look a little bit like the PC industry, which is kind of flat and not super exciting on growth. The growth is all about the software. Right? The future. Because as a CIO, I'm also a customer of our own data center group.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:19) Right.

(Art Hu at 00:40:20) So the future is everything software. No, not everything. Everything. Right? But if you look at the profit pools and the value migration over time in what has historically been like kind of the infrastructure services and the technology computing services, it's software-defined. And so I think that's been a very interesting transition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:39) Yeah. People will lean towards convenience by their default. Right? And so if you've got convenience without an increase in cost, right, and you have convenience without inconvenience, then that will win. And so that's largely the part why the exodus from the physical machines to the Amazons really happened, because now I don't have to call up a data center, have them build me a machine. I can just deploy one. Now, that doesn't mean there's no use cases for having your own stuff. For example, there are some companies that I know that are working on some very cool stuff, and it will always be on-prem. Right? Just because of the nature of their business. But I love the fact that you're so aware of where the industry is going and that you're leading the company in that regard. Right? Because that gives me—like, I would invest in Lenovo now knowing that you're there. Like, look, things are gonna happen. The right things are gonna happen. Like, if somebody said Lenovo, I'd be like, look, you know, I don't know how their financials are, but they have some bright people, and I always tend to invest my time and energy and efforts into technologies where I know the people are bright. So I'll actually look up who's at what companies and who's behind the technology before I integrate it into my company. Cool.

(Art Hu at 00:42:06) That's a good side effect of our discussion then.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:08) Yeah. I'm curious to know. There was one thing in the show notes that I had never seen before, and so I must ask about it. Two-speed IT. Is that a—can you explain that phrase to me?

(Art Hu at 00:42:21) Yes. Absolutely. So two-speed or bimodal IT, within the CIO community. I think Gartner had actually coined it. I think it just refers to the fact—I think Gartner was trying to shake people out of their torpor and say, you can't just be the guys who are looking after the server room and reorganizing database tables. That's not the future of IT. And so they said, look. For some foreseeable future, there's still going to be on-prem, and then you're gonna have, you know, existing things that are non-virtualized, non-elastic, non-horizontally scalable, and that's fine. We'll call that speed one. Speed two is then the things that are what you need to do when faced with high uncertainty. Right? So exploration, experiments, right, responsiveness, in a way that no one was used to. And so the bimodal or the two-speed just referred to that. You had kind of one speed for the existing and the other speed for going more quickly. And so that's what it is, and I think it's something that came from Gartner. That being said, I think the concept makes a lot of sense, and I think, spiritually, I think it's very accurate. Right? The notion of you can't just do the same old, same old, I don't think anybody would argue with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:40) Right.

(Art Hu at 00:43:40) I quite frankly find it polarizing, and I really think it does, in some contexts, more harm than good to do that label. Right? And I'll take an experience. And so—I think the spirit of don't do the same old—that's absolutely a recipe for stagnation. That absolutely makes sense. But I think how you frame it and the culture, as we've talked about, is so important. And so just to share from my experience, the reason I really stay away from this two-speed, right, is that it separated people into classes. Right? We said—because I think we actually gave it a try. Right? A few years ago, we're like, oh, right. We need to be two-speed. Yeah. We don't wanna just be one speed. And then the way it took hold in the organization is people took sides. Right? People were, I want—I'm the fast speed. You're the slow speed. Oh. You're bad. You're all gonna be fired, or you won't have jobs. And it just created this terrible organization dynamic where it was the haves and the have-nots.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:46) Uh-huh.

(Art Hu at 00:44:47) It created all sorts of tension. It was very unproductive, right, in the worst way you could imagine. Right? It created real cultural tension in a way that was, right, negative energy for the company and for the team. And so, right, rather than two-speed, when I became CIO, we did away with that. And I said, guys, everyone has skin in the game. Right? The old stuff doesn't work, but we're not two-speed. Right? My appeal to the team at that point to get away from this toxic "you're slow, I'm fast. It's your fault that I can't go live more quickly." Right? That's not a winning recipe. And so my appeal to the team and part of the reason I think it's so exciting to be a CXO, whether it's an information or it's technology or digital—I think we can talk about that. They're all the same thing, by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:33) Chiefs of the tribe. It's just—

(Art Hu at 00:45:35) Right. But what we got away—is, guys, technology is everywhere. I think that's why it's so exciting to be in this position, and it's a privilege now. Right? As all these things come together, the point is everyone should have all these speeds. Everyone should have all these speeds. And I made it a very public point. Like, for example, in the old way of looking at it, if you were in the one speed—let's say you were the command center, right, or the call center that resolves tickets. Every company has it. Someone needs to help resolve tickets when your users have issues. Right?

(Art Hu at 00:46:05) Not sexy, right? Wrong, right? And my team, I shocked my team because I think the command center leader was used to being, yeah, I'm just the ticket person, and I guess I just take calls all day.

(Art Hu at 00:46:16) Like, no, that's totally, totally wrong, right? And they perked up and they said, what do you mean that's totally wrong? I said, well, have you heard of AI?

(Art Hu at 00:46:22) And they're like, yes. It's like, do you have data? Like, yes, right? Because they get, you know, tens of thousands of calls a month with all sorts of issues.

(Art Hu at 00:46:30) And I'm like, so you should be thinking that your strategy should involve thinking about how you can apply AI and machine learning. That you should go be building a bot. That you should be running analytics on the stream. You should be having dynamic allocation. You should be profiling your agents.

(Art Hu at 00:46:45) You should be profiling your users. And the lead, I think that was a touchstone moment because my appeal was, guys, there's nowhere where technology is at. And I flipped the question around on them. Because if anyone thought that they didn't have to be multi-speed, right, then you're thinking about the problem the wrong way, right?

(Art Hu at 00:47:04) If anyone, to the answer of can you apply, and it doesn't have to be AI, it can be whatever technology is relevant for you, right? Whether it's Kafka and streaming and processing on how you want to look at event data, whatever the answer is, whatever your domain, wherever you are, whatever level you are in the organization, if the answer to can I apply new technology to explore something interesting and needed that would change the way I work?

(Art Hu at 00:47:27) And if the answer was no, you're thinking about it the wrong way, right? Absolutely thinking about it the wrong way. And that was a real eye-opening for the team, right?

(Art Hu at 00:47:36) And same thing for the guys in the data center, right? You've got guys who are like, I've been a database admin. I reorganize Oracle and DB2 tables for a living, and I tune parameters to make it perform better. It's like, that's well and good, but right, so what are you going to do when IaaS and PaaS take over the world increasingly, right? And so for them, it was, okay, guys, software-defined data center is coming, whether that's software-defined networks, right, whether that's software-defined, uh, convergence or hyper-convergence between, right, the compute and the network and the storage. All these things are coming together, whether it's from self-provisioning.

(Art Hu at 00:48:18) And so once the teams got around to that, I think it took them a little bit of time, and I think they were scared, right? Because it's actually a very different skill set of, you know, kind of running things in a more traditional way, which we still need, to becoming much more of a code-driven, right, even in operations, skill set. And so the multi-speed for my teams is really we need to do all of the above, right?

(Art Hu at 00:48:45) There's no one who's slow or fast. It's a little bit like wartime and peacetime general that I talked about earlier, right? You're not at war all the time, hopefully, right. Nor are you perpetually at peace. And for my teams, yeah, there's areas where you guys need to go attack and explore and learn new. But yes, we still got our SAP instance, and we still have to feed it and care for it. And those are all valuable things, right? Those are all valuable things. It wasn't inherently, right, ensuring that our SAP instance is performing at its peak is inherently less valuable than getting the e-commerce site built, right, with the new releases once a week, right? There's nothing inherently different about those.

(Art Hu at 00:49:23) They're just different types of value. So that was a fascinating set of discussions with the team, and it's taken me a while to get that to take hold. But I think as it takes hold, right, it's really good to see the positive energy to the team as they imagine what are the new possibilities that they can pursue as well in each of their domains. I don't know if you—that was really long, but anyway.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:46) No, it was poetic. It was beautiful. I enjoy it. I enjoy listening to you speak. When you're talking, things are going through my mind, right? So when you were mentioning that about the data center, the tickets, I thought, you know, they are playing such an incredibly important role because at the end of the day, the reason why a business is a collection of repeatable processes that brings value to the market. So there's a customer and that customer is exchanging, you know, earning money or time, and then they're spending it with your products. And then you then take that revenue and create more value for them, and then you continue that cycle, and that's how, you know, you get income and continue the business, right? So your ability, every job at the organization can be drawn. There can be a line drawn back directly to the value you bring the customer. And if anything, the people answering the tickets are, like, incredibly close to the customer. They play an absolutely essential role with resolving problems in communication, which as a company, nothing's worse than a company going dark, right, when you've tried to reach out for something. So yeah, they're massively incredible, massively important, as well as the individuals that are redesigning the tables or making improvements in the data center because every single day, you have competitors that are making their system smarter, better, faster, stronger, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:09) And now you have the responsibility to your customers to provide them the same level of service and response and speed that the other individuals are so they can be proud that they're your customers. And that brings them value, and that continues on, allowing you ultimately, at the end of the day, to earn some money so that you can enjoy your life and have your family and do the things that we're really here to do in life, and then get to solve some great problems, and then have that nice integration between all of these different forces that are always at play. And so yeah, I'm constantly finding myself as a leader reconnecting that value for others. And while we get in the weeds and we're on the details, to bring them up out of it and say, look, this is the why. This is why we're doing it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:56) I'm a big fan of Simon Sinek, who I'm sure you're familiar with. And so I'm always connecting back the why. And I love how you did that because you did it in such a creative way with the AI. I'm gonna totally, I'm gonna make that a clip because I didn't think of that. And that's a really unique way of saying, look, you can be incredibly creative and extraordinarily valuable by the way you're tagging and air traffic controlling the, if that's a word, managing the data flow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:26) No. So yeah, I loved it.

(Art Hu at 00:52:28) And I think that it just goes back to what we, one of the themes we hit on earlier, which is around the spread and the democratization of this, right? As people have more fluency in it, it's more and more possible for people to, or you're just limited by your imagination. That's what I told my team, right? You guys are just too used to thinking about it in a certain way, right? There are no limits. It's just, it's here, right?

(Art Hu at 00:52:49) If you can't imagine something drastically different and wildly, hopefully wildly better, right, then you should start looking within yourself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:57) Did you read my book?

(Art Hu at 00:52:58) I have not, but it's now on my Amazon cart.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:01) Well, you'll see that I say, like, you're only limited by your own imagination. It was this big epiphany, I guess, I had with, like, myself just thinking one day. I'm like, I saw the different people and how they worked. And after, I guess, I had enough interactions, I said, these people, everyone's creative, and people limit themselves. And creativity can be tied, you can learn these things and be open to them. And really in life, you're limited by your own creativity, your own imagination.

(Art Hu at 00:53:31) And interestingly, at companies, I think even for myself, one of the other limiters is also about ego, right? And I think one of the things that limit, because I think what's changed as pace picks up and, right, especially when dealing with areas of uncertainty, it doesn't, this notion of that was wrong, right, sometimes can be very hard to say, right? And sometimes you've limited yourself because you feel foolish saying, well, that was wrong, or, right, as a leader. Because I think the, and in some case, our cultural stereotypes of what we hold up to be good leaders are the firm, the strong, the resolute.

(Art Hu at 00:54:11) And I think that works when things are pretty clear and you know what you want to do, right? But if the facts on the ground and your situation is very dynamic, then what was true yesterday may not be true anymore, right? And the fact that as a leader, if you're adapting to that and changing your mind, it doesn't make you a bad leader. In fact, I think that can make you a good leader, but it just feels strange. It's like, hey, you know what I said last week? I thought about it, and the assumptions don't hold. That's wrong.

(Art Hu at 00:54:36) And so I think I've found I've had to work on letting go of ego, right? It's like, I'm wrong. Let's do something different. Hopefully, we found out fast. And then secondly, I think also in China, right? Because there's this notion of having face, right? And so as a leader, face just meaning having respect, having, I guess, I'm not doing a good job in English of converting and translating the concept.

(Art Hu at 00:55:05) But this notion of face, which is broadly written about, I think I've had to find myself putting that down, right? Putting down ego, putting aside this notion of I need to be seen as being right. And you know, if this is the right answer now given the new assumptions, to just go with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:23) I loved it. I, yeah, I'm wrong a lot, and I attempt my best to reduce the space between me realizing I'm wrong and then communicating my new findings because that's always important. And then I also found in my own, you speak a lot about self-awareness without using the word self-awareness, and that's what I really, one of the things I very much enjoy about you. But when we were talking about ego, that is to me, it reminds me a lot of discipline. Like, it's always there. It's always something you work on, and then the more that you allow yourself to be aware of it, the better you can respond and train yourself to handle it. And I don't mind being wrong. I mean, there's always that gut of, like, oh, this sucks. I'm wrong.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:14) But like, I don't let it get to me, like, get me down and persistently pull me down. But I also rationalized—sorry, the point I was trying to make was the way I rationalized my acceptance of that is by saying that I don't repeat the same mistakes multiple times. So I can be wrong and I can make a mistake, but I rarely am repeating that same exact mistake multiple times. And if it happens the second time, it's enormously loud to the point where I will take some large action to correct it because I shouldn't be making the same mistakes twice. So I acknowledge it the first time. I figure it out, and then if I notice that same one happening again, I'm like, this is an extraordinarily rare occurrence. Now we have to really reflect on this. So...

(Art Hu at 00:57:01) I agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:02) Man, we did it. We made a podcast.

(Art Hu at 00:57:05) Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:06) It was fantastic.

(Art Hu at 00:57:07) We'll find each other on WeChat and email later.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:10) Yes, we will. See you, bud. Bye-bye now. Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:20) Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:24) You guys are the absolute best.