The Path To CTO with Hillery Hunter, CTO of IBM Cloud

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Hillary, CTO of IBM Cloud, and they discuss why removing ego and emotions when asking leaders for their opinion is extremely important, Hillary's career path from being an individual contributor to CTO at IBM, and the benefits of intimately knowing your strengths and weaknesses. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:41) Now, one of the things I really wanted to talk with you about is this concept of sovereign clouds, because I had never heard about it until preparing for this interview. And so I was hoping you could explain to me what those are.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:00:55) Yeah, absolutely. Sovereign cloud is a term that's come into more popularity, especially in the last year, I would say. When there's shifts in the geopolitical landscape, everyone starts to look at where is my data, who has access to my data, how do we need to protect things, how do we need to protect critical industries? And from the perspective of that intersection of that conversation, which is in part a policy conversation but also a regulatory conversation and a conversation about the critical things that support all of us in our daily lives—I mean, it's banking and telecommunications and healthcare infrastructure and things like that—there comes about this conversation, then, about, do you know where all your IT is? Do you know where all your data is? And do you know who has access to it?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:01:35) And so in many ways, we view this really as a concentric set of conversations and thoughts. It starts with data privacy, knowing that things are protected and knowing who has access to them. It expands out into where things are, so sort of data residency and then locality of where all the things are that are operating on that data. And then, ultimately, what's usually formally termed sovereign cloud is to say, am I sure that my data can remain in country, operated on by people that are in the country, only accessed by those folks, and that the resiliency and other things like that are just really well understood? So it can be a very robust and secure infrastructure for critical kinds of things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:34) Yeah, because I looked up the definition of the word sovereign, and it was like great strength. And so I was wondering, like, what a weak cloud is, but it sounds like a weak cloud would be something that didn't take into account all of those things.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:02:46) Yeah, and it often has to do with national sovereignty, I think, is sort of where the term comes from. A lot of different countries and geographies and such at the moment have just really been trying to understand how do they feel about data moving across borders, or how do they feel about companies with different home countries having access to data or control over their IT operations? And so a lot of it comes from the sovereignty notion of countries having sovereignty and having control and regulatory control over what's done. And I think that for us, as we talk to customers about it, it starts with that data privacy and data governance conversation, because for a lot of organizations, there's a lot of modernization, right? This modernization discussion around, do I have access to everything that would be useful for my enterprise to know about? Do I have access to historical data in an easy and an agile and a cloud type way? Can I perform analytics easily? Can I look for fraud?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:03:48) Right? All those questions—do you know where your data is and who's using it for what purposes?—begin to be the start of a conversation toward addressing what your country might want to do about keeping data in country or keeping operations on that data in country and just really ensuring, ultimately, that everything is compliant and secure and protected. Those are really the key topics.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:13) Yeah, I think the big one in the news recently was TikTok wanting to operate in the U.S. They had to keep their data in the U.S., and I didn't dive a mile deep into it. I just sort of saw the headlines flying back and forth. But that's what I'm thinking about currently when you're talking about data inside of different countries.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:04:31) Yeah, well, and if you take a step back and think about it, we have lawmakers that set policies for our countries, and they're elected officials. They're serving on behalf of the people in the best interest of those people and the best interest of the country. We have regulators that also take decisions and make rules and oversee particular industries like financial services, right? I mean, we're each consumers. You and I have bank accounts and credit cards, and every listener to your podcast does as well. And we look to, in many cases, those organizations to protect and ensure that the financial system is running well and working well. No one wants a big crash or their money to be at risk or other things like that. And so when you have a bank account and it says it's FDIC-backed, and you know that the regulators are overseeing that bank and its operations, and that extends to considerations about their IT and their computing and the ways that they're protecting data and ensuring that things aren't going to be breached or held subject to ransomware or all those other kinds of things.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:05:39) And so we as consumers look to lawmakers and regulators in many situations to ensure that that kind of critical infrastructure is up and working, that power comes into the house and cable and the internet works and banking works. And we don't often think about that whole overlay system that runs, but those authorities in different countries are taking different decisions and different policies around data protection and ensuring that their country's critical infrastructure can be safe and secure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:10) So you're a huge multinational company, and you have data centers in multiple countries, I'm assuming, because I know you're the CTO of IBM Cloud, right?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:06:20) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:20) You're cloud computing. What is the name of the role that looks at policy in different countries and translates it down into business to make sure, like, developers have the correct access to what they need so there's not cross-pollination?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:06:37) Yeah, I love that question, because it's something that we've really been spending a lot of time on as a cloud provider that has a lot of clients in the financial services industry within our cloud, as a provider that, to your point, we are multinational, we're global, we have data centers around the world—in the U.S. and Canada, in Brazil, in the U.K., in Europe, in Australia, in Japan. I could keep going, right? But we have all these different places and all these different considerations on what the local regulations are and then the regulations within specific industries. We've put together a program that we refer to as industry clouds, where we have advisors to the client process that partner with them on their journey to cloud, we would say, that help them take into consideration the regulations and the security and the compliance upfront. And then we have specific tools and technologies like what we call our Security and Compliance Center that have, for example, a profile that can be used by developers to deploy and monitor their infrastructure on the cloud.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:07:46) So for Australia, the regulatory body is called APRA, so there's an APRA profile that you can use, then, to ensure that, as a developer, you don't have to go read the regulations. Ultimately, that's the goal, right? We want to abstract out all that knowledge and map that into things that automatically deploy, automatically are monitored according to those considerations that there's an obligation to keep up with. So we call the overall structure that we do to help, for example, banks meet those regulations, Cloud for Financial Services, and we have now over a hundred banks that participate with us globally in defining that program, right? Because there's kind of a three-legged stool. You need to know what's going on with regulators. You need to know what's going on within banking, and then you need to know how to build a cloud.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:08:34) And you bring those three parties together. And so we have folks that join along with our clients that know their specific industry, and then we have technologies and tools that help translate that, then, into things that developers can use to make sure their code is safe, make sure their deployment environments on the cloud are compliant to these requirements and things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:56) So it's sort of baked into the culture of the teams?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:09:00) It is. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, we have—to your question very specifically on what are the people called—one of the roles that we have within our cloud organization to help clients with this is called our Chief Risk Officer for Financial Services. Because if you take this whole topic about regulations and security and—one of my favorite statistics was a CIO survey that was done by a consultancy. They said between February and April 2020, right, really when the pandemic started, the ransomware attacks on financial services went up by a factor of nine. I mean, that's huge, right? Really an order of magnitude in weeks, honestly. And so when you talk about cloud, there's a need to manage risk, right? Ensure that things are going to be secure and ensure that you're going to meet the regulatory obligations and ensure that your skills and your people are going to know how to do it well. So we refer to our Chief Risk Officer as someone who can be that trusted partner to help folks move to cloud in light of all of these considerations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:04) Okay, so there's maybe a Chief Risk Officer at the top, and then they appoint other risk officers down the chain? That's like a department?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:10:12) It's really interesting. So within many institutions that are looking to move to cloud, one of the best practices we've seen is to not have one single person be responsible and be the person who has to move everything to cloud, but to create a joint responsibility model, right? There's a CTO that might be definitely responsible for getting things to the cloud, but to have them sit in a little bit more of a board construct with a Chief Risk Officer that says, hey, this or that is changing in regulations, and then with a Chief Information Security Officer, a CISO. And to have them move to cloud be a joint responsibility of the CTO, the CRO, and the CISO, and how those personas and what those people do every day, right? I mean, the CISO is defending against the bad guys, helping look at the latest technologies to defeat various types of cyberattacks and ransomware. The CRO kind of steps back and says, well, if we move this piece, I need to make sure that the resiliency is properly solutioned, or, hey, regulators are changing some of the questions that they have.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:11:21) And the CTO is just wanting to get the technology done right, get the workloads deployed and up and working and service the developers. But when you bring those three personas together, you can really help everyone go faster because there's better understanding and things can be jointly designed for a successful deployment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:41) And so what are you spending your days doing? Like, who are you talking to? Is it mostly customers or internal team things?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:11:49) Yeah, I spend, I would say, probably about half my time on customers—meeting with customers, digging in offline into what the things are that they're trying to accomplish. And then I have a team internally that is responsible for the architecture of our cloud itself, right, so how things function within the cloud. I have this Chief Risk Officer that I mentioned, who helps us make sure that we have headlights onto what different industries are looking for out of cloud, and we interlock that then with the design and architecture of the cloud. And I have a team that works on solutioning, so they work on solution patterns. So folks that are looking to move particular types of business processes to the cloud, they help them understand how to do those business processes in a more modern way. So, spend probably about half my time really working on our cloud itself and half my time working with our clients. And that gives me a synergy of saying, the real-life problems that are going on out there with clients, how do we then bring that back and quickly respond to that and update our offerings and all that kind of stuff?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:57) And then is there a CEO of IBM Cloud? Is it sort of its own organization within?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:13:04) So our structure is that we have a Senior Vice President of IBM Cloud who reports to the IBM corporate CEO. So our Senior Vice President has responsibility for the full P&L of the business and everything. So it's kind of a CEO-type role if we were a standalone company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:22) And then do you have P&L responsibility?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:13:25) I do, within the financial services sector. And this began actually a couple years ago. In my role purely as our CTO for Cloud, I was spending so much time in banking and working so closely with our product management organization that I took on a joint responsibility as our General Manager of Cloud for Financial Services and Industries. So I have a team that works on telco. I have a team that, as we're talking about, works on financial services, other folks working on healthcare and other industries. So within those industry-specific programs, I have some business responsibility as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:59) That's amazing. Yeah, a lot of people often will ask me that are farther along in their career, they'll say, hey, I want to get experience and understand more things about the P&L, because I talk about it a lot on the show because I'm an entrepreneur, and I didn't go to a college to learn. I just opened a business, and when you spend your money, you figure it out real quick, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:21) So how did you get that opportunity to go from not managing a P&L ever to the first time you've gotten to manage one?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:14:29) Yeah, so it's been interesting for me. I think that a lot of stepping into a general manager role within our Industry Clouds program, as I mentioned, came as a natural step because I'd really helped define what the technology would be, and I was working with so many clients that taking on some additional responsibility and then track and monitor the health of how that business was going and get more involved in the go-to-market and other aspects of it came as a pretty natural step for me. But I'll tell you honestly, that journey started back in 2017. I was appointed an IBM Fellow, which is a technical ranking within the company. And I think, like many companies, IBM talks about a technical career path and sort of what the steps on it are, and then it talks about more of a business or management career path, which has the different rungs of layers of management. And I was, at the time, I would say, much more invested in my technical career than I was in necessarily being a business leader. And I went in 2017, the very first week that I was appointed as an IBM Fellow, I went to someone whose advice I really respected, and I said, hey, Dave, you've seen many Fellows.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:15:44) You've seen folks that have been successful in getting their ideas adopted by the business and folks that haven't been successful, that are technical geniuses, that just haven't managed to convince the company and its leadership that they should invest in what they're proposing. So what's the difference? And he said the difference is the amount of time that you personally invest in understanding what's in the head of the business leaders. Right? And so that started me on a path of, you know, consuming even as just a technical leader, so to say, consuming as much of the financial information about the business, the processes, the operations, how are we actually selling things, what did customers think of us, NPS scores, all that kind of stuff.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:16:28) Right? And I was really doing that so as to be more effective in helping to get investment for the technical ideas that I had, that my team had, etcetera. And it just gave me exposure to how a lot of what we do from a business perspective has a lot of engineering to it. Right? We tend to separate the worlds, but there's a lot of process engineering, right? If I do this and I go to market that way, it's going to cause this effect. And if I compensate people in this way, cause different parts of the business to function in different ways. It's not that different fundamentally from what many of us are trained to do in engineering. So once I was able to get that perspective, it helped me be more effective as a technologist, but then also made me much more comfortable with getting into those processes and mechanics in terms of the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:18) Oh, I completely understand. The first three businesses I built, I was the technical co-founder. I was just responsible for building the technology and the teams and all of that. And then on this most recent business that's been going on for about five years, I'm just the solo founder. And so when I had to go through the process of learning sales and learning how to build sales infrastructure and sales teams and generate steady flows of meetings and things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:44) As I started to get into it, I'm like, this is engineering just with humans and processes.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:17:51) Yeah. No. You got it. I mean, I think that there's a lot of language, and I think a lot of people get kind of intimidated by the language. But I think, you know, there are some really concrete techniques. Right? You know, find a CFO friend. I always warn the current CFO that I work with, and I'm going to talk about how helpful the openness and transparency that we've had. I mean, he comes to me with technical questions. I go to him with finance questions, and just, you know, it's very much an agreement that there are no dumb questions. We're just going to ask each other what we don't know. Find a buddy in sales, you know, that you can have a totally transparent conversation. I feel like I should know how, you know, something happens in step 32 of a contract, but I don't. Can you please tell me? Right?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:18:38) And likewise, those folks come back to me and say, I feel like I should understand X, Y, or Z about our product offering. I don't. Can you just tell me? Right? And I think that intentionality in moving into any new area, but also in trying to cross that bridge between technology and business and management within a company or within the company that you're founding. Like, often, I know a lot of founders I talk to have a board of advisors, so to say, that they have that totally transparent relationship from, hey, I sense I have a blind spot or a knowledge gap over there. Can you just tell me how this goes? Right? And I think that that openness and that learning process really helps overcome any language gaps pretty quickly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:19) Yeah. I found the openness was something that I started to do early on, and then I noticed that I wasn't doing it intentionally. And then I noticed that it was a reason that I was getting to the result faster. And then I saw other people who weren't doing it. And what I came to realize from that experience was if there's enough urgency and there's enough focus on the outcome and the goal you're trying to achieve, the worrying about is this a silly question or the worrying and anxiety sort of fades away because it's just, like, what's the quickest path? How do we just get there? Let's spend the resources we need. Let's ask the questions we need. Let's keep everything open, and that tends to work really well. And then the art is, you know, surrounding yourself with those people. So yeah.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:20:03) Yeah. No. I love that. I love what you're saying about, you know, if the goal is the goal and everyone's agreed on what the focus is, it just kind of helps everyone set their egos aside. You know, I heard a speaker at a conference a couple years ago say that they felt their job was to remove the ego, opinion, and emotion in decisions that they were overseeing. Right? They called it the EEO. But, you know, to remove, set aside the ego, set aside the opinion, set aside the emotions, and just kind of have a conversation on the facts. What do we know? What do we need to learn? You know? And how do we get to end the job most quickly? It's such an amazing description of great teaming.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:41) Yeah. I knew you'd be a great person when I read your background and I saw how far you've gotten. I'm like, yeah, she's going to have a lot of really good ideas. I'm curious to know, you know, to get to where you've gotten professionally, it takes an enormous amount of focus. It takes an enormous amount of discipline. Where did you pick that up in your life? Did your parents have it? Did you go through some difficult moments? How did you acquire that discipline?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:21:05) I think it's probably genetic. I can't take too much personal credit for it. But, I mean, I was really focused in school because I love learning. If you ask me when I was a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wanted to be a teacher. You know, when you want to teach, you want to know, you want to grow, you know, so that you have something to share. And so I think I was very focused from a pretty early age on school and achieving and learning in school. And, you know, that translated, you know, into then pursuing graduate studies. And I think that also, you know, one of the things that's helped me stay focused is mentors that I had pretty early in my career who really helped me fine-tune what it was in an understanding of what I was good at or the value that I brought to particular projects. Right?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:21:56) And that often was in a translation kind of function. If you heard just five, ten minutes ago, I talked about the language gap, right, and figuring out how to get through the language gap to understand business discussions if you're coming at it as a technologist. But if I hadn't studied engineering, I would have loved to have studied linguistics, right? I've been someone who always wants to understand what's being said, what are we actually talking about. And so, you know, kind of helping me understand early in my career, I had multiple mentors that were really influential and really helping me focus. Right? And you've got to kind of figure out what you're good at and what you're not good at. And eventually, as you move into management, that means what are you going to do versus what are you going to ask other people to do? And having that, you know, awareness of where you need to get better at things and grow, so you're going to take it on for that reason versus where your time personally is best spent. Right?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:22:52) So, you know, I will often personally get involved, you know, again, whether or not it's with clients or internal teams and situations where, you know, folks are kind of at loggerheads and not understanding each other. Right? And I find that, you know, thirty minutes and I can often help untangle, okay, wait. You know, what's everyone saying? Right? Back to the personalities within clients, you know, why is the information security team not going to approve what the CTO is doing, you know, vice versa? Why is the CTO not able to move quickly enough? How can we help create a new structure? How can we use technologies to do that internally? Why do we have a debate going on about the best path forward?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:23:31) So sort of how I spend my time and where I spend my time with my teams, I think, has been really the product of amazing mentoring that I've gotten that has helped me kind of understand, you know, where my natural proclivities are and where to therefore, you know, the types of projects to jump into so that I'm going to be most successful in helping the team push through them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:52) Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, most of business is talking to other people. Yeah. And I found that a lot of, as you mentioned, a lot of the miscommunications are two different people saying the same thing but with different words.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:07) Yeah. And then, you know, being able to connect that up is incredibly valuable.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:24:12) Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:14) So what's the hard part of your job?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:24:16) You know, I think, maybe what some people would point to is the hard part is one of the parts that I enjoy the most, which is strategy. Right? I've always really enjoyed technical strategy, which to me means how do we make strategic bets informed by business realities that are going to get us in the right position a couple years down the road. Right? And it's hard because nobody has a crystal ball. Right? The last couple of years have thrown curveballs at so many of our clients. Right? You know, companies that have had to, you know, IBM worked with a company that had to stand up, you know, their country's equivalent to the payroll protection program. If you remember that in 2020, you know, ensuring people got paychecks and could feed their families, they had weeks to do it, to create an entirely new thing they've never thought about doing. It's effectively a loan processing program, but different and very regulated and run by or with the government, etcetera. Right? And so so many different organizations that we work with and internally as well in terms of how we operated, so many things had to change. Right?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:25:10) You know, but when you have a robust strategy and a robust kind of roadmap and you have been working on the fundamental underlying things around elasticity and automation, all that other kind of stuff, you're ready to deal with that variability. Right? So, fortunately, from a cloud perspective, we were able to accommodate and help and help with a lot of change. And then the question now is, as many folks are facing cybersecurity concerns, as many folks are trying to deal with, you know, ESG factors. Right? So carbon footprint, carbon neutrality, zero footprint, all those kind of things, those commitments that companies are making.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:26:07) Where does IT, where does cloud computing come into play, and how do we make sure that we have really robust answers to those things out over the next couple of years? And then quantum computing. Right? Making quantum accessible through the cloud and all that other kind of stuff, but then also quantum-safe security and quantum-safe algorithms so that, you know, your data never could be cracked by a quantum computer. Some of those things are really fun to talk about. The details of implementation are things that we really have to work through and make sure that we get them right because they're very long-term decisions. So that strategic aspect of, you know, looking out a couple years, if we do a sequence of things, you know, in the right order and with good execution, then we'll get to a better place and help people be able to deal with the realities of the world, you know, even two, three, five, ten years out in the future. I really enjoy that aspect of my job, but I would say, in answer to your question, it's always the toughest because who knows what's around the corner? And a lot of assumptions and such have changed in the last couple of years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:10) Yeah. I got to talk about, I think, a year or two ago to Robert Sutor, who's an IBM fellow, and he works on the quantum computing.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:27:18) Yeah. He's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:19) He's got a book called, like, Dancing with Qubits. He was really, really smart, and he just let me, like a kid in a candy shop, ask him all the questions in the world that I had about quantum computing.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:27:28) Yeah. Yeah. It's such a fun topic. I mean, Bob and I have done, you know, some discussions like this, you know, and sort of talking about how does quantum and the way people use it relate to things that we know now, like, you know, how AI is computed using GPUs or other things like that. So, you know, how does quantum fit in as a future computing model and stuff? So there's all kinds of topics all over that landscape.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:51) Yeah. I think shout out for IBM. Don't you have a playground, like a qubit type playground where people can actually go and run quantum code or quantum mathematics?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:28:03) Yeah. We do. And, honestly, I'd encourage everyone to try it. If you just, you know, search for IBM and quantum or something, you'll very quickly land on the right pages. But, you know, I have colleagues even whose high school kids, you know, are using the kids' kit and running things on the quantum computers and stuff like that. So it's super accessible, great developer experience, really, really well designed. You know, you can learn about quantum. You can do some quantum experiments. You really don't have to have read 10 quantum physics books, you know, to try it out. There's a lot of, you know, examples and things like that that you can build upon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:40) Yeah. I personally ran through it after talking with Robert or Bob. I don't know. But I just remember his name from the title. Like, in my head, I see the title of the episode.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:28:50) Sure. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:51) Yeah. Yeah. And I'm like, I would rather be more formal than not because some people are—

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:28:54) Yeah. We usually call him Bob. I think he's okay with that, but it's fine. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:58) Yeah. Yeah. He seemed like a really relaxed, cool guy. I think we were talking. He was at his cabin, and we were just hanging out. I wanted two things. So the first is it is a very cool interface because I went and explored it after, and it walks you through. It truly is like a playground experience. So you can just start with any experience level. You can start with it and have some fun. But the second thing I didn't want to gloss over too much was you were talking about strategy, and I want to know where is a good place to start learning about that. Any favorite authors or books?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:29:29) Yeah. You know, it's interesting. One of my favorite descriptions of how to do kind of strategic innovation, when the book came out, it didn't have the exact sort of graphic in it that the professor had described when he was teaching it to us. But it goes roughly by saying that if you're wanting to do strategy, you can set ambitious goals for a team. But when you start, they're not going to know much about the topic because you're working on something that's going to take two, three years to develop, and this applies to a startup as well. He was talking specifically about innovation in large companies. But you're going to start with a sparse set of data. Right? If you imagine, you know, a graph, an X-Y plot, you're here at the origin, you're wanting to go to the moon somewhere out there, but, you know, you only have a couple of dots that tell you how to fit a curve on that graph. And you have to have the right culture to say, we're going to address a strategic topic as a team.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:30:27) What do we all know? Going back to some of the things that we talked about and being as egoless as possible in these kinds of conversations that mix technology and business, what do we all know? And how do we stick a couple of data points on the graph and decide as a team to take the leap of faith and set a strategy, set a curve through those dots? But how do we continue to come back together and openly discuss and debate? Oops, I found another data point. Oops, there's a cluster of data developing on the bottom side of the graph.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:30:59) Maybe we need to shift the curve, shift the technology, shift the direction we're going a little bit. And I just love that description, and it's not something that I use as a formal method with any of my teams or projects, but it's constantly in the back of my mind. Let's go ahead and make a leap. Let's encourage an investment. Let's look at a business case that's aggressive.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:31:19) Let's look three, four, five, ten years out, and let's get going. Right? Let's get a squad of people heading in a direction, building technology, doing something. But let's constantly check in. Because if we send that project or that team or that technology off and we don't constantly check back on it and have, I guess I would say, the humility to adjust the strategy based on new things that are learned, we're probably not going to get to the moon. We're probably not going to hit the target.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:31:50) And so that for me is just a powerful thought that is in the back of my mind when working on future projects. Let's get as much information. Let's try to take decisions, but let's try to constantly go back and revisit and learn and refine and discuss those things and have the right team culture where that's then possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:10) Nice. Nice. So a lot of experience and just a lot of figuring it out for getting good at strategy.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:32:18) Yeah. I mean, I think that there's certainly things to be understood from a more consulting sense—how McKinsey or BCG or companies like that put together certain methods and such. A lot of that tends to be more at the intersection of the commercial opportunity for a technology, and helpful for using and building a business case. I think it's tough when you're in the position of being the technology leader on a topic. It's tough to make up a specific matrix or formula in my mind other than really that iterative refinement.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:32:51) Right? Take a leap toward a large goal and continue to iteratively refine it. And there's plenty of process and methodology that you can point to in terms of—we often architect things first, and then we do MVPs, and you can bring in agile and anything else that you want. Right? But I think fundamentally, in my mind, when we're talking technical strategy, a lot of it is just really being willing to take a decision early enough, but having the humility to come back and really address that and having the team feel open enough to question and bring in new information and such so that we all can adjust together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:30) Yeah. I've had a lot of failures, but I found success in testing commercialization of an idea. So looking at ratios of cold outreach versus response to see how much—I call it market pressure—there is. Like, how much pressure is there? And then if you can relieve that pressure, you can have a revenue stream.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:49) And if there's nothing there, there's nothing there. So I used to start by building products by working with a company that had an issue, and they said, okay, well, this is how much this issue cost me. And then, you know, that would be a justification for building a tool. So that worked pretty well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:05) But then when going out and having a couple ideas of what you want to create or a general area where you want to solve a problem, I found this method of seeing how much sales pressure is there first because I was actually able on my last company to get people to pay me for the product before it existed because there was enough pressure there.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:34:25) Yeah. That's amazing. No, I love it. And I think that it goes to some of the things we were talking about just in the sense of not viewing technology or technical strategy as ever something done absent from the broader market conditions and business.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:34:38) Right? Because in early conversations, even when people were paying you, but in the process of doing that sale, you were getting feedback. Right? And that's the product testing then. And you then have your sponsor users and all these other aspects, right, that help with that iterative refinement that I was talking about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:59) Oh, yeah. As a young entrepreneur, I was around other people, and I saw them having success. And I would look at their pitch deck, and it looked like something done in Paint on Windows 95. And I'm like, how is that pitch deck landing you all these deals? It doesn't look good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:13) You need a designer. It needs to look pretty and all this stuff. And then I found out as I grew, it's because they're solving the problem. It doesn't—I mean, doesn't matter a whole lot. The pitch deck can look like—as long as it conveys that it can solve the problem, then that's a start.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:27) And the bigger the problem, the less pretty it needs to be.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:35:31) Yeah. Well, I think when we're working with large enterprises, there's a lot of work that we try to do to understand what's in the mind of the CIO right now, what's in the mind of the CTO, what's in the mind of the CISO. Because to your point, it's the same thing with our enterprise products. We need to be addressing an actual problem that the market's having. We need to be addressing concerns that people are dealing with right now from a cybersecurity perspective or from a regulatory perspective or from an industry-specific lens.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:36:02) What's going on in healthcare? What are the major trends? What's happening in telco because of 5G? Right? And so those felt needs often actually are generated by new technologies coming about. Right? So needing to respond to how might 5G change my industry, how might immersive experiences or whatever it is that's come about as a new technology, change where I need to modernize and shift and adapt my IT. Right? And so those are often—those disruptors from a technical perspective are also then the things where we can then provide solutions that address those really strong felt needs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:40) Now I am watching the time, and I want to be respectful of the time. But I do have a last couple questions for you. We got to talk about Sovereign Cloud. We got to talk about strategy and some of your experience in your day to day. But you have been at IBM your entire career.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:36:56) I have. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:57) How is that possible?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:36:59) Yeah. It's funny. I had an interview maybe six, nine months ago. Person said, describe your career path. And I said, well, I first worked on things that were on computer chips—caches and embedded DRAM on the computer chips, on these multibillion transistor chips.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:37:15) Right? And then I worked on memory technology and that turned into high bandwidth memory technology. So how do you feed the processor with all the data? And then the most hungry thing that requires high bandwidth memory technology turns out to actually be AI because doing machine learning and deep learning, it's just a lot of math. There's no way to get around the fact that it's a lot of math.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:37:38) So it sucks up a lot of memory bandwidth and uses GPUs. And that then turned into, well, where's everyone doing their AI computing? Well, they're doing it in the cloud. So then I began working in cloud. And so the person's reaction was actually, and how many companies have you been at? I said, just one.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:37:54) And they said all of those things in one company? And that's really why I've had such a rich career at IBM is just the breadth of the company in terms of all the things that IBM does. We still today, even though I'm no longer in that area, we have people that design microprocessor chips that go into enterprise servers, into the Power systems and the IBM System Z. So we have people that work down literally on tuning the performance of transistors and building processors out of it and work on memory subsystems.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:38:27) We have people that develop technologies for AI and all those algorithms and all that kind of stuff. And then even outside and above the cloud in the stack, there's all kinds of people doing different software and middleware and transformation at that level, and then there's consulting and people that understand industry processes and how to transform your major industry functions and run payments better and adapt telco environments for 5G or work with ExxonMobil on their rewards application for consumers. Right? So the breadth of technology in this one company is so wide that I've really been able to kind of have a new career in some sense every two to three years, which has been really exciting for me. And there's a story that I can kind of tell about the adjacency of each area that I've worked in, but it's been really great for me as someone that just loves learning to constantly be able to expand and move into an adjacent area.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:29) Yeah. Curious driven people seem to go pretty far. 500 plus interviews, and that's what I can take away from it. If you're curious and you're willing to do the work, you can go super, super far.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:39:39) Yeah. Well, I started out in IBM Research, and our building in Yorktown Heights, New York has, I think, close to 2,000 people, many of them PhDs. If you have a question about astrophysics, you can go and find an astrophysicist. If you have a question about weather, you can go and find someone that understands the physics of weather modeling. There's the quantum scientists like Bob Sutor that you were talking about, but then there's people that understand every aspect of computing and have invented, in some cases, individuals that have invented hundreds of things in their careers.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:40:14) So starting in that environment and seeing the breadth of people there and then moving into our actual product organization in IBM Cloud really gave me a good idea of how IBM takes ideas and then turns it into actual products. And I just love that intersection of the technology transfer and solving real world—the ability to sit somewhere that has that depth of research. There are people I can call when we have customers that get stuck on something. There's a physicist or a computer scientist or something else like that that can bring their expertise to bear. So we have IBM Research as a resource pool also for our clients and their problems.

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:41:00) We have them as a source of ideas and innovation and prototypes and POCs and MVPs and things like that. We absorb their technology into what we're doing. And so it's just this great synergy and opportunity to continue to drive technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:15) Well, Hillary, we did it. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Hillary (CTO of IBM Cloud) at 00:41:19) I feel great. It was really fun talking to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:21) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.