Joyce Mullen - Digital Transformation, Consolidating Your IT Vendors to One

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Joyce, the president of Insight North America, and we discuss how Insight guides companies through the complex digital transformation process, the advantages of consolidating your IT vendors down to one, and why it's important to take care of your people first to achieve the best business outcomes. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) It's Joyce.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:00:44) Hey, how are you? That's peachy. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:48) Living the dream.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:00:50) Cool. What's happening? That's a good beard you're sporting there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:54) I grew it myself.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:00:56) You did? Nice job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:57) I did. This is six months of beard, so I cut it there because it grows really fast. So it's been about a year since I've had the beard since COVID, and my wife loves it.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:01:10) There's a lot of COVID beards in our family too and really long COVID hair, so it's fun. Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:17) Now do people ask you, so your husband has a beard then?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:01:20) No. My husband doesn't, but we have three boys and a daughter and lots of boyfriends and girlfriends and stuff like that, and there's a lot of beards.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:29) The people that hang around the house. Right?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:01:31) Yeah. Exactly. They're all living here. They're all working here. It's crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:36) So where are you calling in from?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:01:38) I'm calling from Austin. Where are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:40) We are over in Florida.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:01:42) Oh, where in Florida?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:43) Well, so I tell most people Tampa, but we live in Bradenton, which is like an hour south of Tampa. Bradenton, Sarasota area.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:01:53) Nice time of year in Florida. It's not too hot yet?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:55) No. It's too hot. It's officially too hot.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:01:57) Oh, it is already hot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:58) This jacket's deceiving. What I do is I use the air conditioner to its max capacity so that I get to connect with my friends when I interview them in Colorado and whatnot.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:02:09) Ah, yeah. That's good. That's good. But you don't need that if you're talking to somebody in Austin. It's hot here too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:15) Oh, I know. I know. We're actually pretty excited. We're doing a ten week trip around the United States, and we're gonna come back around through Texas, like Arizona and Texas. We have a lot of friends, and my dad's side of the family is from Lubbock, and so we like it out there.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:02:31) Oh, it's good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We actually, my husband's gonna do that drive from Austin to Phoenix tomorrow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:37) Oh, really?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:02:38) Tomorrow and the next day. It's like sixteen hours, but there's a lot of desert between here and there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:42) Have you seen the night sky out in the Arizona desert, like the Milky Way and all of that?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:02:48) No. I mean, I haven't really been very much in Arizona, but I'm gonna start being there more, so that's good. But I've heard it's gorgeous. And the sunsets in Arizona are beautiful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:57) Oh, so beautiful. It's like hunting down nature.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:03:00) Exactly. So there's some big forest fires like in Big Bend. I don't know if you're planning to go through there, but there's some rough patches right now. It's so dry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:08) Oh, wow. Okay. Well, we'll, yeah. We know where our first stop is. We're going from Florida to Montana, and then we're gonna be in Montana for like six weeks exploring the parks, and I'll be doing the podcast from Montana. And then we're doing two weeks back, and we're gonna go down. We wanna hit the Arizona desert and then see our friends in Texas.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:03:26) Cool. Yeah. Well, what a fun adventure. Good for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:29) Yeah. Something different. So I wanna talk about you, though. This show is all about you, my friend. You're the star. We just kind of hang out and talk. But I wanna get to know you as a person. I know you've got your professional career and Insight, but I wanna know the background story. Take me back to young Joyce Mullen.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:03:49) Oh my gosh. Really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:51) Yeah. Really.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:03:51) Okay. Well, I grew up most of the time in Connecticut, so I'm from New England. Born in Waco, Texas, though, so that comes in handy. When you're hanging out with Southerners, you can say you're born in Waco. Went to school in New England. I have six kids in my family, kind of a Brady Bunch kind of family. I'm the oldest. After college, I went out and worked for one of my professors in Monterey, California for a while, which was fantastic and tons of fun. And I went to college with my husband. At the time, we were good friends, and he also happened to move out to the Monterey area. So we got married at a very young age. We've been married for almost thirty-five years. And he's fantastic. And we've had four kids, moved all over the place, traveled all over the place, and feel very lucky about that. Our kids are fantastic. They are really, really important to us. We have two dogs. That's the story.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:47) I love it. I love it. Thank you for sharing about your family. That is amazing.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:04:51) How about yours?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:52) All right. So my family, I met my wife about seven years ago. We've been married for about four, and we have two kids. We have Aria. She's about 3.5. And then we have Lochlyn.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:05:05) So lucky.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:06) He is just over two. So an older girl, younger boy.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:05:10) Oh, so fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:11) Yeah. How do you do it? Like, give me some advice. How do you be a good parent or be a good mom and then also raise a family, but also kick butt in your career?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:05:20) Well, I mean, I think it's helpful to marry well or have a good partner. Because it's not something anyone does by themselves. Right? So my husband's amazing, and he has taken—he's a historian. He got his PhD while I was going to business school, and then in our first jobs, we lived in Europe for a while, and he could just do his work from there. And he's been very willing to be the more flexible parent, so that's been really helpful. But, I mean, it's very much a partnership, and, you know, it helps if you don't have to sleep a lot. I think it helps if you have a sense of humor because it definitely requires all that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:03) Yeah. It's like you're up anyway because of the kids. Might as well get some work done. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:09) So give me the overview real quick of what Insight does.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:06:13) Yeah. So I'm super excited to talk about Insight. I'm very new to Insight. I've been here for six months, so I cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, say that I'm an expert. But I have worked with Insight during my twenty-one year stint at Dell. The last few years, I was leading the global channel, so I got a chance to work with Insight as a partner. And what's been fascinating about Insight is that it's gone through, like everybody, a pretty massive transformation over the last five years. So Ken Lamneck and the leadership team have done a really good job assembling a kick-butt portfolio, honestly. I mean, we've combined the legacy of a very strong supply chain-oriented capacity and capability around hardware and software resale with a whole bunch of very carefully curated services companies to help us build out the capabilities so that we could not only provide the technology, but also help our customers implement the technology so they could get the outcomes that they're looking for. And we do that through our services, our professional services, managed services. And so what Insight does is it helps companies of all kinds of different sizes, in all different industries, who are trying to figure out how to get the best use out of technology to improve their customer experience, improve how productive their team members are, improve their processes, their operations, and grow their business. So as a solutions provider, we're really well positioned to be kind of that one partner to help with some of these pretty complicated decisions and a pretty complex journey. But I always said it when I was at Dell and I say it now is, man, technology is not getting any simpler. So the choices are increasing pretty dramatically. Everything from processors to different types of clouds that customers can use. And they really need somebody—someone who's seen a ton and sort of done this a bunch of times with customers—to guide them through their own kind of digital transformation journeys. And, you know, some of these projects require 10-plus partners to get something actually done if you're gonna implement, for example, an intelligent edge solution. And so we can do all of that for customers. And it's super exciting because you gotta be a big fan of technology. You gotta truly believe that technology can help us solve some of the world's most vexing problems, which I do believe. And you gotta be able to work across a vast group of partners to get the right skills, the right solution in place to deliver the outcomes customers are looking for. And those outcomes are things like, hey, I want a production line that's gonna create less scrap. I want a process that's safer for my team members, or I wanna deliver a higher value or a better customer experience in a retail store. Those are the things customers care about, and technology can help them do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:22) So do you have a specific area of business? I know you're a large company, but do you have, like, is retail larger or maybe oil and gas? Is there a specific industry that you're more popular in?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:09:33) You know, that's a great question. I mean, we definitely have areas of focus. So we've done a ton of work in the manufacturing space, a bunch of work in the retail space, a bunch of work in the banking space, a bunch of work in the hospitality industry. It's interesting because when you build these solutions, lots of times, 90% of these solutions are pretty consistent industry to industry. We call that a horizontal solution. And so it's really around which software are you using for the last 10% or how do you package it up so it makes sense in an oil refinery versus a car manufacturing plant versus a retail store. So we support all different industries, but we do modify the solution slightly to make sure it works for the industry that our customers are in and for the outcome that they care most about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:28) And then what drove you into this? Like, when did you fall in love with technology?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:10:33) You know, I spent my first almost ten years of my kind of real career, I would say, at Cummins Engine Company. Cummins Engine Company is a diesel engine manufacturer, so it's pretty different from Dell or Insight. But what I learned there—and I did all sorts of different jobs there. I was in charge of a distribution business where we were trying to sell, you know, move filters all around the world. We got to live in Belgium while I was doing that. I was a plant manager for a while. And what I could tell, and that was many years ago, but what I could tell then is that technology was changing how we did distribution, how we thought about inventory management, how we thought about our manufacturing production lines, how we thought about material planning and scrap and all that sort of stuff. And I had a friend who went to Dell, and she said, hey, you should come down, check it out. I mean, you would really, really like it here. So Michael Dell had just written his book Direct from Dell, and I had read it. And I thought, yeah. I should go check this out. And I left with an offer the same day, and I called my husband from the airport and said, hey. We're moving to Texas. And then I had an incredible set of opportunities at Dell working on supply chain issues at Dell, working on the technology side, moving into the sales organization, doing sales ops, running various businesses at Dell. Ultimately, running what we called our OEM division or intelligent edge division, which is where we sold technology that was part of something bigger, badder, better. Like, think about an MRI machine has a computer in it or a gas pump has a computer in it or those kinds of things. And I absolutely fell in love with that business because that's absolutely an area where if the customer does better, Dell did better. And so our goals were so aligned, and I loved that. And then I got the chance to continue with that business, which was growing really fast and it's super interesting. And I got the chance to lead our global partner business, which is half the company. And I loved it. And I got to learn all about different partners all over the world, and I could see which partners were doing which kind of work and how they were solving customers' problems. And it was—yeah. I've been hooked. I've been hooked for a long time, as you could tell.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:59) What was the exciting part, like, when joining Insight? You know, you're talking with them. You got to know them through your channel partners. But like, what really sealed the deal that you were like, I wanna go work with this company full time?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:13:10) Yeah. You know, it was, so I made the decision to leave Dell, which was a super difficult one. But I made that decision just because I'd been there for so long, and I was worried that I wasn't learning as fast as I had up till that point. So I made the decision to leave, and then I had been talking with Ken, the CEO of Insight, for quite some time as a partner, of course. But then a couple months earlier, they knew that they had a need for a new leader of North America. So I started talking with them, and I knew already that the portfolio at Insight was broader than any other partner that I had seen. Maybe with a couple that were close in Europe and places like that or in Asia, but the strategy, the acquisitions that Ken and team have made was highly differentiated. And then I gotta say the foundation, the values at Insight are really, really consistent with how they operate. So we talk at Insight a lot about hunger, heart, and harmony. And so this company is built on really a strong foundation of values that are aligned with my own. So that, and plus the opportunity to do what I thought I could help with, which is create even more value for customers, seemed like a great opportunity and too good to pass up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:30) So when people ask you at parties or events, like, you know, what do you do? What's the short answer?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:14:36) We help customers use technology to make their businesses better and run smarter.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:42) Everybody wants that.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:14:43) Yeah. Everybody needs that. By the way, if you're not doing that, your competitors are. So you gotta get with the program.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:50) That is 100% true because there's gonna be someone out there who's hungrier. I'm a very hungry person. I have a very hungry team, and I realized that the distance in which a company will travel is directly proportionate to how much hunger it has.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:15:04) Exactly. And that's one of our values, hunger. Yeah. You got it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:07) So we don't even buy paid lunches here. No kidding. You gotta be hungry. Right?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:15:13) No food.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:15) Oh, this is fun. Okay. So tell me about what your customers look like. You talked a little bit about these four verticals that you focus on, but can you give me a customer use case or a customer story of some sort?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:15:29) Sure. I would love to. This is the most fun part. So I mentioned that Insight kind of started as a supply chain optimization technology provider. Right?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:15:39) So we had a long-standing relationship with a really large grocery store, and we have been providing them with devices for years and years and years. But over the past couple years, as we made all these acquisitions and as we've increased our portfolio and improved our skills, we've also been helping them really reimagine and modernize what their customer experience in their stores was. So we did all sorts of analysis. We looked at their customer buying patterns, tried to figure out how to improve product stocking mechanisms and algorithms, figuring out how to staff to line up more effectively with when customers were in the store, and figured out how to better manage any kind of disruption in their stores. We put in an intelligent edge solution that looked at everything from real-time pricing updates with dynamic pricing on the shelves for products to monitoring energy usage for their lighting and their freezers and things like that.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:16:44) So a fun fact is, you know why there's so many really bright lights in grocery stores? Well, it's because you gotta have really bright lights to read those little labels on the shelves. But if you have technology-enhanced labels, it's easier to read them, and you don't have to keep those lights on so brightly. And grocery stores are saving lots and lots of money on energy that way, and it's also a better customer experience. Who likes to be in that really bright iridescent light?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:17:13) Right? So, you know, historically, I would say grocery stores would use only their point-of-sale data. So it's only at the checkout where they really collect the data. But now we can use things like sensors that are tracking in-store traffic. Like, how many people are walking down certain aisles? What is the status of the products on the shelves? How are the freezers and the refrigeration units functioning? Are they keeping the food safe and at the right temperature? What is going on with our dynamic pricing? What's going on with in-store advertising?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:17:49) All this stuff, we're capturing all kinds of information from so many different sources and then providing a pretty comprehensive and dynamic look at the business. So that helps them make better decisions. It helps them innovate. They could test things out. They could figure out what works better, and it's a great deal for that grocery store.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:18:09) And we've taken those same kinds of solutions and deployed them in other kinds of environments, retail stores that maybe aren't grocery stores or a brewery in Cleveland. We did the same kind of thing. So it's really fun because it's giving our customers a different way to understand their business, make decisions about their business, and deliver better experiences for their customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:35) How do you choose with all these great projects going on within the org, right, from the grocery stores to the breweries and all those? Like, how do you go about choosing which customers to drop in on and really get to understand them to stay connected with the business?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:18:51) Well, you know, I mean, we have a pretty huge customer base, and we have really tight relationships that have been built over years and years and years with so many great companies. And so we really start with those because they're now thinking about technology very differently. Ten years ago, you'd mostly spend time with the IT department. Right? You'd mostly be trying to sell them laptops and servers and storage and things like that.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:19:19) But now because these data are so valuable, you really are spending more time with the business units that are driving the revenue in the company. And that's really exciting because that's where there's tons more upside. You know, ten years ago, it was really about cost management. And now if you spend more time with the business units, you get to think a lot more about revenue generation and what makes their company grow. So we love those projects where customers are excited about engaging with us at the business unit level, not just procurement and the IT team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:57) So I was reading your website. Like, one of the advantages that is commonly brought up is that you get all your stuff, all your IT services from one vendor. Right? But that made me think, okay. So when are they coming to you? Have they already decided what they want to do, and they're coming to you to help you coordinate everything? Are they coming to you and needing you to be a consultant to help them transform their business because they don't know what they need to do? What part do you come in at?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:20:27) Yeah. I mean, it really depends on the customer. So some customers have really big teams that have been thinking about how they transform their businesses over a long period of time. They have a plan. They know what they want to do. They understand what data is available, and they're generally looking for someone who can help them execute the plan. But more often than not, especially when it comes to the power of these data, customers, and certainly this is true if you get away from the very largest customers, they just don't have the skills. They haven't really thought so much about it. They haven't really dedicated time and effort to thinking about this.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:21:02) And then we start with them more with some kind of workshop that really helps them identify what their opportunities are. So we love those because we can really help them shape their strategy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:14) So you have both sides. You have a consulting function that will workshop with you to figure out how to transform, and you can also take people in that already have plans and just execute it with them.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:21:25) Yep. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:26) It's pretty smart. Now I see why you joined.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:21:30) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:30) So what sort of, there's obviously advantages, right, to having a partner that is connected with all of these different IT services. Right? Because there's gonna be cost savings and things like that. But what do you see in your sales process? What are the reasons, the advantages that your customer gets?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:21:49) Well, for sure, there are several. So for sure, you gotta be able to talk about how you can reduce the operating expenses associated with deploying these solutions. So that's always gonna be an issue because if you wanna free up money at the customer site to actually spend on doing things better, you gotta make sure that the cost of running the core systems gets reduced. So that's always an opportunity. But then the more exciting opportunities are these opportunities at the edge where you can help them grow revenue.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:22:31) You can help them improve the customer experience. You can maybe reduce dangerous work for teammates, for the employees of the customer who are maybe having to walk along railroad tracks to monitor the health of those tracks and replace that with some analytics that are picked up as a train goes over those tracks, for example, or you can improve patient outcomes. I mean, that's where I think there's really an opportunity to unlock the power of the data.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:57) Are you guys doing a lot of work with IoT?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:23:00) Yeah. So IoT has gone through lots of different names, and so I've been working on that for a long time. But this notion of IT, which is that sort of traditional approach, and obviously IT is getting more agile and flexible, et cetera. But combining that with operating technologies, like I mentioned, as a plant manager, I cared a lot about what were the systems that allowed my production lines to keep running. Right?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:23:32) So it's when you combine those two that you can really dramatically improve the results of a company or an operation. And that's why the Intelligent, that's the new name, really is Intelligent Edge. And that's gonna be bigger than the public cloud. No doubt about it. And that's just because of physics. You gotta be able to make real-time decisions at the edge. You can't send something back to a public cloud and wait seven seconds if you're trying to make sure an autonomous vehicle is not gonna crash into something. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:05) That's how I would want it. Yes. I would write a letter to Elon Musk if it wasn't designed that way.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:24:10) Exactly. Yeah. Assuming you could live through the ride. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:15) Right. So when you're going about your life and you see all this technology, are you always connecting business back to it? Because I—

(Joyce Mullen at 00:24:24) Oh, yeah. For sure. Not just technology. Also customer service, customer experience, all that stuff. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:30) Yeah. You start to see—

(Joyce Mullen at 00:24:30) Opportunities everywhere.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:32) You start to see businesses in a new light. I can actually see, alright, this business is on a slow downward trend, or this business is undiscovered, and it's gonna be huge. And so do you guys do investments and purchase companies at Insight?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:24:46) Yeah. I mean, the way that Ken and team assembled this incredible portfolio was largely through acquisition. So there were, I don't know how many companies, maybe ten, fifteen, something like that over the last ten, twelve years that Insight has bought to pull together this portfolio.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:04) Can you give me the context of how large the company is?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:25:07) Yeah. So we are just over $9 billion in revenue.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:11) $9 billion? Yeah. Okay. And then how many people is that?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:25:17) 11,000 people. That's crazy, Joyce. You're responsible—

(Joyce Mullen at 00:25:19) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, I would say 8,000 of those in total are really great salespeople, technical architects, engineers. I mean, these in the technology, I mean, basically, that is the source of the expertise that we offer to our clients. So it's pretty powerful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:43) What's the hardest part of this job?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:25:46) We're trying to always get, first of all, our customers to understand the art of the possible with technology. That's a big chunk of what we do, helping them see how we can help them improve their customer experience, their process flows, et cetera. So, you know, that's gonna continue for a long time. I think it's also driving the change internally. So we gotta get 10% better every single year. We gotta get 10% smarter every single year. So that's all of us, all 11,000 people. So we gotta make sure we've got the right kind of support for our teammates to drive that level of improvement because our customers deserve nothing less.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:27) I love that. You know what's interesting for me, as you were talking about that kind of, it made me think of this. So I would say that I've considered myself successful as a human. Right? Like, with the things I care about, like health and things of that nature. But then professionally, only recently. Right? And one of the things that I've noticed is that I'll have other professional friends and they'll see the growth or whatever in the business that I have. And they'll be asking me, you know, how I'm doing it. And they have different businesses of different sizes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:59) But one of the things I'm picking up on is it's actually hard to get them to invest in themselves, in their own businesses. And so I was thinking about that because that's what you're essentially doing. You're having to get people to invest into their own business. And I found it oddly funny because I pay myself the least amount of money possible, and I roll everything back into my company because I enjoy having more people over more objects. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:25) And I know that if I just do this long-term in the next ten years, it's gonna be crazy big. Right? And so but when I ran up against this with these people, I'm like, their growth stops at the moment that they're no longer willing to invest in it, and they just start pulling the cash out. And so do you have this conversation with companies that are, you know, probably some mid-level companies that need to invest in themselves to stay relevant, but have you noticed that some are hesitant to?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:27:56) Yeah. I mean, you know, you're helping me a lot because I hadn't really thought about it in those terms, but for sure. So I guess there's a couple dynamics. One is there's fear. We see that a lot. Right? Oh my gosh. What's everyone else doing? How do I do it? So I would say those are not the businesses that you're talking about.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:28:17) But then there's plenty of businesses, and we probably spend less time with them because, honestly, they don't seem like really good prospects for us. Right? If they're not curious and excited to innovate and to make the investment, I'm not even talking about what they pay us or anybody else or what they buy. I'm just talking about making that commitment to say, I want to be better. Then we're probably not talking to them. It's interesting.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:28:43) I hadn't really thought about that, but it's probably a screen that we should probably more formally put in place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:49) Yeah. It's interesting to look at different companies and watch their values and see how from the outside, before I started the podcast and talking to all these great leaders, I kind of scoffed at the values. You know, you would see this, oh, those are just words, bullet points sent down from the executive team. And now that I've gotten to do 400 of these and go around the world and meet these people and see their teams and get all this variety of experience. You know, not everybody's awesome, but most people are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:20) And it realized that that is the single biggest indicator is, does the company have the values? Do they care about them? And then do they live them? Are those an accurate reflection of what's actually happening on a day-to-day basis within the org? And if they are, typically, the company is gonna do really well and they are doing well and they're growing. But there are times when I've seen it, those are just bullet points that are on the website or some sort of annual initiative and the company doesn't live it out and there's discontent and disjointedness in the org.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:29:51) Yeah. And you raise a good point. So when we're starting on a digital transformation project with a customer, the technology is kind of least of our worries. You really gotta think about is the org ready to change, and you gotta understand that. And you can usually suss that out with just some pretty basic questions trying to understand what's making you think you gotta drive this change.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:30:16) Are you, what are you investing in it? Why are you investing in it? And have you figured out what problem you're trying to solve kind of thing? But those questions can unearth a bunch of that. But then this is all about people. This is all about people and process. So you gotta get ready for that change, and you gotta say, okay. This is not about building an app. This is about really changing how you're gonna improve how your customers experience an interaction with your company or how they get value out of what you're offering them. And that process, that preparation process is so, so important as you think about these kinds of things.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:30:57) And, by the way, customers fall out at every stage of this stuff. Right? I mean, because if they don't really know what problem they're trying to solve, then they're probably not going to be successful. If they don't or aren't willing to put the time in to sort of prepare for that change and get really their organization kind of ready for it, then that won't be successful. And then you've got to do all the change management work with the team.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:31:20) You've got to enable them. You've got to listen to them. You've got to talk with them. You've got to make them part of the process. You've got to figure out how to get them excited about what's coming on the other end.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:31:30) And then you can actually start writing the app or building the technology or building the solution because that's not the hard part. It's all those other things. And then, of course, you've got to manage it once you're done because you're really not done. It's just, you know, it begins as a sustainability effort that's got to continue for a long time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:49) What sort of mistakes do you see? Because you're in this—everybody talks about digital transformation. Right? It's a hot topic. But your business, you're built to digitally transform other companies. Correct me if I'm wrong. Right? Do I have an accurate understanding?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:31:59) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:59) So because you're an expert in the space, what mistakes—what are the common mistakes that you see companies make when they fail to digitally transform? Like, I used to be an app developer for ten years, and my favorite customers were the ones that would come get quotes from me, then say it's too expensive, go lose a bunch of money somewhere else, and then come back to me like a year later. And the reason why they are my favorite is because they were the quickest to close.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:32:12) Yeah, exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:12) Like, let's do it. We want it done right the first time. We're willing to pay for it now. We just had a year of heartache. But you obviously would have some experience seeing companies failing to go through this transformation. And so I want to know what common mistakes do you see out there?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:32:44) Yeah. You know, I think oftentimes—this is kind of interesting. I mean, we have seen—I shouldn't say often, but we definitely have seen customers who say, you know what? My CEO or the board is saying I need to be in the cloud. Help me get to the cloud. Or I need to have an app. Or, I mean, it's kind of jumping to that fourth step that I was just talking about, right, which is kind of what technology do you want to deploy. And so it feels to some of those decision makers that they're just getting pressure to do whatever the trend is. So I need to—hey, I've got to do AI. Can somebody give me some IoT? I mean, those kinds of things are really dead giveaways that probably you haven't defined the problem effectively, probably haven't defined what outcomes you're looking for, probably haven't prepared for the change, probably haven't sort of started getting the organization ready for that. And so that is probably the most common. And I think you're exactly right. People can spend a lot of money sort of jumping into a solution without really thinking about what they're trying to get out of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:56) So I was reading around in the notes, like, preparing for the interview, they had this like five steps of digital transformation. Now I can't remember all five unless it was like maybe a talk I was giving. Do you know all five steps of digital transformation?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:34:12) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that they're pretty consistent with what I was just talking about. So you've got to know what you're trying to solve. What's the challenge? What's the catalyst for change? What outcomes are you looking for and why? So that's back to your point. Are you really clear about what you're trying to get done? Then you've got to prepare for it. I mean, that means you've got to start getting the organization thinking about what do we look like today, how will we transform whatever process or whatever experience we're trying to transform, and then how will that look on the other side. And you've got to think about that not only in terms of technology, but also business process flow. And also, you've got to make sure you're thinking about things like security and what data you're trying to collect. And it's really about sort of getting a really clear sense of where you are today and where you want to go.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:35:04) Then the next one is enabling the workforce. So everything comes down to people, people and process, and you've got to make sure people are with you. You've got to understand kind of—because they're smarter than you. I mean, they know those processes way better than you do. So you've got to make sure you're listening really carefully to what's important to them, getting the feedback, engaging them in the conversation, making them—you know, building them into advocates for these changes that you're driving.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:35:32) And only then do you actually implement the technology, the solution. And when you do that, you've got to use modern practices. Like, how do you make it as interactive as possible? How do you make it as agile as possible? How do you control for risk and compliance issues, that kind of thing? And then you've got to manage it after you implement that because you're not done. You just got a new product. You got a new service. You got a new capability, and then you're going to want to improve that over and over and over again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:02) Yeah. Nobody told me in business that once you make the business and you've got something that works, you have to continually make new things that work.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:36:09) Exactly. You can't be done. Yeah. If you're done, somebody else is doing a better job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:14) Yeah. It's like you're always going out of business. It's this concept. Right?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:36:18) That's a very negative—

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:21) I know.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:36:21) I know. There's always an opportunity for improvement.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:24) There we go. I like—see, if I hang around listening to those Elon Musk interviews, he's like, we reduce the probability of failure. We don't achieve success.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:36:34) He's brilliant, though. Gosh. You've got to love him. I love how he boils it down to, hey, you've got to just have the best solution. You've got to make the service—your service, whatever—the best in the world. You've got to make your product the best in the world. I mean, it is kind of that simple.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:46) It is. And if you've ever hung around a Tesla store, the salespeople almost are sitting back and other customers are like selling the other people in the store. It's ridiculous.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:36:57) Yeah. I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:57) People love their Teslas.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:36:59) Bought one this weekend, actually. I haven't had a Tesla before. So, anyway—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:05) What an experience?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:37:05) Excited about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:05) Which one did you get? The X?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:37:07) No. I got the Y.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:08) The Y. Nice.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:37:10) The Y. The X—you can't get an X until, like, I don't know, November.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:14) Oh, everything's back-ordered. You can't get so much stuff right. I was just working on getting a truck, and they're like—so I called around and they're like, yeah, we raised the price $3,800 because it's called a market adjustment because you can't purchase them. They're selling the moment they leave the factory floor before they hit the dealerships. I was like, get out of here.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:37:33) You can't get a hot tub. A hot tub is back-ordered for a year. I don't know. It's crazy. I mean, I'm glad the economy is doing well. Right? That's good. And for most people, but not for everybody. That's the issue.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:45) I know. It's so weird. All these little micro supply chain issues that have happened—we're all aware of. The national one was the toilet paper at first, but it's a year and a half later, we have these weird outages of things.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:37:57) Well, and by the way, technology—I mean, the supply chain issues in technology are super interesting because, first of all, the demand is off the charts because of obvious reasons. Everybody now, I mean, people used to have maybe one computer for their house, and now they have five or seven or ten or whatever. But also, everything out there is getting smart. Right? So you need those same—you need some kind of processor. You need some kind of memory. You need all these products. So I think it's a good time to be in technology because there's a lot of demand for a long time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:29) Do you guys have supply chain customers? Do you get into that world at all?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:38:33) Oh, yeah. For sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:34) Very cool. Have you—what was the coolest—have you ever gotten to visit a factory? Like, you worked at Dell, and they kind of did it. What's the coolest factory floor that you've been on? The coolest manufacturing factory floor you've been on?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:38:46) General Atomics. They make drones.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:48) Oh, did you get to see a drone swarm?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:38:51) I got to launch a drone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:52) You got to launch a drone?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:38:54) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:54) Tell me about this. What do you mean?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:38:56) Yes. Well, there's—you know, computers are in drones, obviously, because that's how they fly. And I went to visit a customer, General Atomics, and they—I got to—basically, when you launch a drone, it's like launching an app. I mean, it's the same kind of thing. And so I got to launch one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:12) Oh, I thought you put a drone into some sort of rocket launcher type thing and shot it out. And—oh. Okay. I mean, the military is doing some crazy stuff with drones.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:39:21) Crazy cool stuff. Yes. Yes. Crazy cool stuff and some scary stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:25) Have you seen the drone swarms yet?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:39:27) Only, you know—

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:28) Only on the—kind of—yeah.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:39:30) Yeah. You know, we're using drones in warehouses to do inventory, basically cycle counting. You know, you can send a drone around and say how many boxes are in this location and that kind of thing. Again, crazy—

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:45) Really?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:39:45) Crazy, crazy cool technology advances. It's very fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:46) Oh, man. That is so cool. I love it. I love—we're living in the future, Joyce.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:39:51) I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:52) How do you feel?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:39:52) I know. Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:55) It's like we're the Jetsons.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:39:58) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:59) I've got some leadership questions for you.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:40:01) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:01) Because you seem to be really into this. Good head on your shoulders. If we were to design a perfect leadership program for your direct reports, what would the top concept in that program be?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:40:14) I don't know if I can think of only one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:18) Think of—give us multiple. That's fine.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:40:20) Well, I'll tell you a couple—I mean, a couple of things that I think are really, really important. So I feel like, first of all, you have to have huge ears. You have to be willing to learn from anyone, anywhere, anytime. And I learned this in the manufacturing plant at Cummins, and I quickly started—you know, I could look around the plant and understand who really knew what was going on. And there was this guy who smoked four or five packs of cigarettes a day. He worked there, and he was the original IoT. He could put his hand on a machine and tell you when it was going to fail. He could look around the plant and see based on material flow kind of where the problems were. And this guy was amazing, and he could not read or write. He signed his name with an X.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:41:07) So I feel like the first thing is you've got to listen and be willing to learn from anyone, and it doesn't matter at all where they went to school or what kind of degrees they have or whatever. You've got to find the people who really know what's going on and listen. I'd say the second thing is you've got to be willing and excited about hiring people smarter than you because it makes your job a whole lot easier, and it's really all about people and talent. Another thing that I would say is you've got to be relentless about thinking about the customer first. You've got to put yourself in the customer's shoes all the time. You've got to make sure you're thinking about everything from their perspective, not yours, because their perspective is the only thing that matters. And you can have the most precise operation, and you can make sure it's the most efficient. And if the customer doesn't value that or it's not important to the customer, then you're spending time and effort in the wrong spot. And then I think it's all about being accountable and, you know, owning stuff, driving results, taking ownership when stuff is bad. You know, if things go wrong, take the hit.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:42:13) Your team has to know that you have their back. And so you spread out the recognition as broadly and proudly as you possibly can. And when stuff goes wrong, you take the hit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:26) So is this type of stuff what you teach in—you guys have a leadership program, I assume, because you're so large.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:42:31) Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, Insight has been doing FAIR training for a long time. It's a leadership training set of trainings that come from West Point. And then we had different ones at Dell, but, I mean, you kind of learn the hard way the whole time. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:49) Hey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:50) Yep. Yep. And then you end up surrounding yourself with people that have similar values. So, yeah, that's interesting. I'm curious to know when you hear the word leadership, it's kind of ambiguous. People use it in so many contexts. So how do you define the word leadership?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:43:07) Yeah. I don't think leadership has anything to do with position. I think leadership is all about a state of mind, and that's what I mean. I think there are leaders everywhere in the world. There are leaders who don't have anyone reporting to them. There are leaders who have gazillions of people reporting to them. I think it's not about your station or your position. It is about how you think about your role. I believe we have some terrific leaders in the organization who, you know, are frontline kind of customer support type people. And then we have terrific leaders in the organization who are great salespeople. We have terrific leaders in the organization who are awesome in the warehouse, who do a great job every day, set an example. So state of mind.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:51) What's the most—or the best leadership advice you've ever received?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:43:55) I just did this—I just did this article in the, um, Business Insider, I think it was, and I told the story about when I was a very young plant manager. I was not at all qualified to be a plant manager. I had been in a plant tour once, I think, and I complained one too many times about the delivery from this plant when I was running this distribution business at Cummins. And they said, fine. Why don't you come be the plant manager? So I said, yeah. Sure. And so I went and listened to a bunch of plant managers who'd been doing this for fifty or sixty years. I mean, literally, these guys have been doing this forever. And this guy gave me some great advice, and he's a man of very few words.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:44:32) He said, "Joyce, just paint the bathrooms." And I love that because, first of all, I had no idea what he was talking about, but it took me a while. And then I finally understood that what he was saying is invest in your team. Because if you invest in your team, they're gonna see that you actually care. And if you do things like paint the bathrooms on a factory floor when the bathrooms are kind of crappy and old and stuff's broken and fix them up, then you're saying to those team members that they are important because they are.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:45:03) And but you gotta show them that they're important. So anyway, I love the—at first of all, I love the visuals. Second, it's pretty simple to understand. And third, it came from a guy who was so smart about how to run a manufacturing environment and a plant, and it really, really helped me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:22) It sticks with you too. Paint the bathroom. I like it.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:45:24) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:25) I like it. Yeah. Well, as we start to wrap up, what's the call to action? How can people learn more about Insight? Who would wanna become a customer? What's the call to action?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:45:33) Yeah. I mean, I think it's very broad, but I think anybody who wants to drive improvements in their business leveraging technology, which I think, of course, quite biased, but I think that should be every business, every organization, every school, every city, every department of the federal government. I mean, everybody should wanna be excited, curious, and optimistic about what technology can do for them and for their customers. And I think technology is poised to solve some of the world's most vexing problems, and that's everything from how do we personalize medicine and literally cure cancer, or how do we solve the environmental challenges that we have all over the planet? I mean, how do we deliver better experiences for patients or citizens or customers?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:46:28) So I think you gotta be excited about what technology can do for you. And if you need help sorting that out, we can help you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:39) Awesome. Is it—and you guys actually have the domain insight.com, right?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:46:44) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:44) That's so cool. When I saw the insight.com, I was like, this is so cool.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:46:48) I know. We have to say "no pun intended" a lot when we're talking about turning data into insights, you know, all that kind of stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:54) I love it. Joyce, we did it. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:46:58) I don't know. I've never made a podcast before, but I listen to lots of them, so I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:06) Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or a colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.