Strengthening Relationships Across The Org with Matt Joe, former CTO at Avanade

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Matt Joe, the former CTO at Avanade. Right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Matt Joe at 00:00:29) Hi, Phoebe. Hi, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:30) Hey, buddy. How are you?

(Matt Joe at 00:00:32) Pretty good. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:33) Good. Good. I was just telling Phoebe our producer's out because he got hurt in the gym. Nothing serious. Just needs a day off.

(Matt Joe at 00:00:41) What's his definition of a gym?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) A place where he builds muscles, I guess.

(Matt Joe at 00:00:50) I think cleaning my kids' closet sometimes feels like a gym.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:54) So we both have young kids then?

(Matt Joe at 00:00:57) Yes. I have a 10 and a six, almost seven-year-old. He'll say he's seven, but he's getting there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:03) I have a three-year-old. Oh, no, I don't. I have a two-year-old and a four-month-old.

(Matt Joe at 00:01:08) Oh my gosh. Yeah, you're in it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) I'm in the zone. Everyone says it goes by fast, and I'm okay with that.

(Matt Joe at 00:01:20) It's gonna be fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:22) Yeah. So just so you know, this is the podcast. Jake will just cut out anything we don't want. There's no big intros. It's just you and I hanging out and talking about technology and life. Is that cool?

(Matt Joe at 00:01:35) That's perfect. Is it also video, or is it audio?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:40) Yeah. We'll use the video for LinkedIn posts. That's the primary way we get new listeners. You'll say something awesome. Everybody will cheer and share the post. That's how it goes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:55) So I was reading your bio, and I was super impressed with all the different groups and the leadership things that you get involved in. People are always asking me, like, how do I get an edge? Do I learn more of this specific technology or get better at strategy? And often, I ask them how they're spending their time, and they're doing nothing social. So how has that played into your career?

(Matt Joe at 00:02:23) Honestly, I would say it's Seattle. It's a Seattle and innovation community thing. We like to socialize. We like to hear success stories. Fundamentally, we like to hear those stories and then reuse them in our own way so that we can continue doing the awesome jobs that we like doing. And Seattle is such a convergence zone, honestly, of everything. The community, Amazon, Expedia, Microsoft, Nordstrom, Eddie Bauer, Avanade, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber's in this building. I mean, you just can't go anywhere without colliding with someone. And it reminds me of going to college in Boston. You'd be on the T in the subway or something like that, and you'd see an 80-year-old guy, and you could literally ask him what he's writing his thesis on, and he would respond. Because the entire community is engaged.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:13) You get the Harvard, MIT. You get the whole group of everybody right there.

(Matt Joe at 00:03:17) Oh, reminds me of one of my worst nights in college, actually. I mean, you start at Northeastern, Harvard, you go to MIT, you end up at Tufts. I don't know how that happened.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:27) My wife just applied there, by the way, so I happen to know that they're an exceptional vet school. Do they do anything else?

(Matt Joe at 00:03:34) Which one? Tufts? I think they're also known for dentistry, actually, and some other thing. I mean, I went to Boston College, but just in the community for sure. But yeah, I think just talking to people and understanding what they're doing, what challenges they're looking at. Seattle's kind of known for cloud and mixed reality and XR, and data visualization and analytics. Right? You go down to the valley or something like that, it's a wholly different conversation. It's all about silicon, security hardware. And that changes everywhere you go, and especially if you travel internationally. And then you find all these interesting collisions of just passions. I love to deal with nonprofits, right? Enabling them through our Tech for Social Good program and those kinds of other things that we do, or me just kind of on the side being the chairman of a tech leadership council for 501 Commons, which is a fantastic organization that provides services to other nonprofits. It's just really rewarding, right? And you kind of meet people with like-minded interest, and that's kind of the fuel that wakes us up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:41) I love it. I actually just about two years ago got into nonprofit stuff as well.

(Matt Joe at 00:04:47) Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, at Avanade, we like to say we want to have a human impact, and I think that's great for a large enterprise company to acknowledge that. But then as a societal member, I just got back from Norway and gave out the Digital Innovation Award for Junior Achievement Europe that we sponsor. And it was fascinating to see the number of entrepreneurs trying to tackle sustainability and tech for good and human impact. And it's that kind of stuff that really is challenging, and ultimately that's where the energy and where technology can really make a big, big impact in society. And it's just fun to talk to those people because they're so passionate about it. And the technology is just in their way. It just literally is in their way. It's not why they're working. But they know that at some point, there's a zero and a one, right? Somewhere. There's a colored pixel somewhere. There's a mobile device somewhere. There's cloud up there where there's stuff happening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:53) What's some of the cool stuff that you've seen recently?

(Matt Joe at 00:05:57) Well, I think the whole trending towards better connectivity, 5G, I think is going to be really fascinating, especially when it comes to the IoT world. We said Internet of Things for a very long time. We're shifting to the Intelligent Internet of Things, IIoT, where these devices have much more compute at the edge. They have better connectivity. You have better automation at that point, better sensing. And to me, that's super exciting because it's one thing to have this digital entity and something you can't see, but it's another thing to blend the digital and the physical together and have real action and real augmentation of our physical sense or physical world or humanity or something like that. That's super exciting. So you get that. You get new compute. We call it quantum-inspired. We're already doing some quantum-inspired work for clients today. And those are really great. And I think user experiences are just top of mind all the time, whether it's employee experience, partner experience, customer experience. The fact that you don't always need a keyboard and mouse to actually input things anymore. It could be a camera. Right? It could be your band that doesn't have a screen that just knows that you're going upstairs or stepping. All these kinds of things are massive opportunities. And that's really exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:23) They come across your life in the nonprofit sector and then some other technologies. But I'm curious about what is happening in your life right now at your company?

(Matt Joe at 00:07:33) Yeah. So our company is going through a pretty awesome transition. I've been at this company twice, from our founding in 2000 to 2009. I left for four years and was a CTO at a digital agency, doing some awesome consumer stuff for big brands. Came back here about five and a half years ago, six-ish, and it was all about that transition to understanding the application and the outcomes of technology. And it includes having creatives working with technologists, having strategists working with technologists. I think now, for example, having digital ethicists working with technologists. I think that's awesome. Plus, we've morphed over the years our delivery strategy in classic consulting speak, which is ultimately what we do. When you're busy and successful, you're at another company. You're not in our culture. But taking more of an agency approach, agency-inspired approach, having our digital innovation studios all around the world, having multidisciplinary teams really tackle amazing opportunities and working together, bringing clients into these spaces. We're investing a lot more in the experience for the employees and for the clients. The work has just gotten better. It's become more impactful. We like to say we want to feed the beast to meeting our teams because we want to attract the innovators. We want to attract the most progressive, optimistic, just amazing technologist, creatives, and strategists. How do you keep them? You don't want to do a bait and switch and say, we're this amazing leading digital innovator, and then here's this maintenance project.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:10) Put them on support desk. Yeah.

(Matt Joe at 00:09:11) I know. I mean, we have them, and that's the great thing about consulting is that if you don't like something, just get through it and gain some experience and then there are other things to do. But we attract them through the work, and we have to retain them through the work. And with great work comes great work again, right? So I think that's the cycle that we're in, and I love the fact that we are finding that balance. Our original tagline was "passion for technology," and that was a thing. We have a very strong gravity towards the technology, which is our differentiation, right? At the end of the day, something has to get done, and that is our legacy. Not like legacy, like ball and chain, like something you put on your tombstone that you're proud of. Right. We can do that. Just the path to getting there, to defining what it is that we're going to build and what impact we're going to have has changed, and that's really super exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:04) So you brought up passion, which always reminds me of the question of how you fell in love with technology. So we're talking a lot about the CTO at this large company, but where did you fall in love with technology?

(Matt Joe at 00:10:16) I probably fell in love with technology a little late in the game compared to a lot of my peers. So I would say probably high school-ish to college. A lot of my peers were really early, hacking their Atari and that kind of stuff. I didn't play video games. I was out playing sports all the time. And then so when I was finally like, okay, well, what is this computer stuff? It was probably more of the creative side. At some point, I was deciding between going to Boston College and the Art Institute of Chicago. I mean, it was just these two drastically different things. But the creative side, the making of something, was really inspiring. And way back in the day when you could get your Gateway, Dell, whatever PC and make the computer and tune it to what you needed it to be. Like, I wanted to boot up Linux, or I wanted to boot up Windows, or I wanted to do both, or I wanted to make my computer a TV as well, right? Because I didn't have a TV, and I was moving from Portland, Oregon to Boston, Massachusetts, and back and forth. Those were really exciting days. And then when I started to discover cognitive science, which was maybe the bigger impact in my life than computer science, just that combination of neuroscience, AI, linguistics, anthropology, philosophy. Bringing that all together, I think the technology stitched it, and I could tell that this was going to be the glue. And it's super exciting because it's always changing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:56) No. I love it.

(Matt Joe at 00:11:57) My family is doctors and lawyers, right? Pretty traditional. And I was going that way. I was going to be a doctor, and at some point, I was like, wow. I don't really want to do that. Then maybe medical illustration because I was an artist. I was like, well, I could blend the two. But then at some point, I was like, okay. Well, this cognitive science stuff is really fascinating because it's about the application of that technology, and it's about the impact. And it just clicked, honestly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:31) Yeah. Yeah.

(Matt Joe at 00:12:34) I'll get back to something else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:36) No. No. No. Actually, no. Now you're in the area that I was just in Sweden, and I was talking with this company called BIMobject, and they're awesome. They do digital object storage. And I was talking with their co-founder, Ben, and we were discussing AI and the future of it and how if it existed, would we even know it existed or would it be busy replicating itself for resiliency purposes and all of this stuff, right?

(Matt Joe at 00:13:05) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:06) And then we got into the larger question of, like, if you look at humans like ants, what are the humans building? Right? Because if you walked up to an individual ant and you were like, oh, what are you doing? What are you building? They'd likely just tell you, I'm just doing what I love in life, and I'm just pursuing my thing. I just really like this crumb, and I'm just going to take this crumb over there.

(Matt Joe at 00:13:24) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:26) But from the outside, it's very clear what they're doing, right? And so we were asking those types of questions, like, what are the humans building? So I like that area of conversation quite a bit.

(Matt Joe at 00:13:36) Yeah. Yeah. I think the technology is always changing. So kind of finishing, I'll kind of go back to where I was, but my dad was like, what is technology like? And he was retired, but he was an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. I was like, well, you know, of course, in your career, you've been fine-tuning your tools. Like, you have that scalpel, then you have that laser, then you have that cauterizer, then you have these cameras and all their stuff. Like, you can get really good at your craft and the tools can really help. Because I can imagine every three years, this is the old days, like shipping software days. Every three years, you open it up and there's another eardrum. There's like two or three or four. Like, the platform's always changing. And I think that in the innovation sense, in the technology sense, that's exciting. It's not scary. It's like a, oh, that's interesting. What are we going to do with four eardrums? My little laser doesn't really work for all four at the same time. Now what do I need to do?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:39) Quad laser.

(Matt Joe at 00:14:40) Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Get some mirrors. Get some gum, stick them all together. Yeah. So stuff like that. I think that's what's really fascinating about this technology is that you're never really done. You have to unlearn and relearn constantly, and it's exciting. It's a good life lesson. I think my kids love it, right? The kids actually naturally do this already. They're building some Legos. They drop the Legos. They rebuild it. They didn't really like it the way it was. They start morphing it. I think that's just a creative outlet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:16) So when was the first time that you went from individual contributor on a team to leading a team?

(Matt Joe at 00:15:22) A number of times. So I started my career, really, what I consider the start of my career, was with Anderson Consulting. This is Accenture now. And our job at the time was to go in and build startups, you know?

(Matt Joe at 00:15:39) And that was our job. Like, they would take equity in the company. We would do services kind of discounted for free, and then with an IPO, everyone wins. Right? It was kind of that time of life.

(Matt Joe at 00:15:49) Everyone was a leader. There was no role. I mean, people use startups today. Right? All of a sudden, you're the CEO, but you're also the CFO.

(Matt Joe at 00:15:56) And if you have an HR department, you're lucky. Right? Or you are the HR guy. Yeah. You know?

(Matt Joe at 00:16:01) It's just a boom. And so I was instantly in that position. I think also the sports world was a big impact on me and how I operate and how I manage people. But, you know, in the technology sense, yeah, I was an engineer. I was a software engineer and software developer.

(Matt Joe at 00:16:17) You know, getting up to the point of being more of a solution architect, taking a leadership role, having a point of view, defining it, writing it down, codifying your point of view, which is really what that is, you know, and then managing the team. So I think that we had this asset called Avanade Component Architecture for .NET, ACA.NET, and licensed that over to Microsoft. And I was the solution owner of the entire asset. It ended up being this massive, widely popular, open source, reusable framework from Patterns of Practice at Microsoft, millions of downloads, kind of got us a little more into the fame of that world. And I think that was the big transition there.

(Matt Joe at 00:16:59) After the fact, it was, you know, we're a very matrix organization. I would say everyone's leading someone within our world or sponsoring them or mentoring them or, you know, just leading teams. Yeah. And then at some point, just everything became everything. And jumping into a Chief Technology Officer role was just natural, whether it's at Avanade or somewhere else.

(Matt Joe at 00:17:23) And, you know, building teams is what we do. It's what I do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:27) Now I haven't heard that term. You said a matrix organization?

(Matt Joe at 00:17:31) Oh, so, you know, like a standard pyramid of, this is my boss, and I only talk to my boss, and then this boss has this boss, and they own this domain. A matrix organization is less structured clearly and more like, what? So, you know, you might have a solid line report like I do, and I might have solid line reports below me, which I do. But I also have all these dotted line people.

(Matt Joe at 00:18:00) And they run and are accountable to a program I run. For example, like our innovation program within the company, they execute it locally in our regions, which is they're awesome partners. Some of them are peer level, you know, as far as like titles. Some of them are more junior, and it's just that we're all in this together. So we feel accountable towards the program, really, no matter who our formal boss is, and ultimately what our KPIs are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:27) I like that because it's way more logical. It's how successful companies are operating whether they articulate it that way or not often.

(Matt Joe at 00:18:35) Exactly. And I think just being transparent about it's matrix, it just lets people know it's okay, you know, and they don't feel like they have to hide behind an organizational structure or they can't have the confidence and the support to step out of it. There is that. We have to have that. You know, career advisors and performance reviews, and we have to have that structure. But how we operate our day to day and the number of work streams we work in, it's okay, and it's how we get stuff done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:03) I'm learning that more. So we started a company out of the podcast, and we're growing. And what I'm realizing and learning more, I guess, just because it's my baby now versus me working as the CTO of a company that I don't fully own. Right? So like, if I see an object, I just logically acknowledge the steps between me and the object and just say, okay, these are the requirements in order to obtain that object.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:33) But a lot of people will just see a solid wall where the object, like, there is no possibility for them to get that object.

(Matt Joe at 00:19:40) No. Yeah. You know, people like you, those are the kind of people that we love to work with because every challenge, every opportunity that we have has some risk to it, has a little bit of obstacles around it. Of course, maybe it's organizational, maybe it's technical, maybe it's something else, maybe it's cultural, societal. Yeah.

(Matt Joe at 00:20:00) We have to kind of navigate. But the journey is the fun part. And I think that getting the momentum, you know, and taking those first steps and getting the energy behind it and getting more buy-in and then transparently showing that, you just attract more energy, more funding, more interest, more skills, more talent. And then the next thing you know, talking about raising kids, the next thing you know, you're at the object. Right?

(Matt Joe at 00:20:24) You're thinking about, you know, middle school or whatever. Next thing you know, my daughter's in, now she's going to be a fifth grader. Boom. It's like, oh, okay. Next thing you know, it's going to be, you know, the next iteration and the next, you know, grades and then high school and then, you know, college and whatever.

(Matt Joe at 00:20:39) And I think that's kind of almost how I had to help people manage their career. It's like, just don't view the object, view the traits and the experiences you want to have. And every decision you have, just kind of bounce it off those things whether or not it's conscious or subconscious. And next thing you know, you're going to be where you wanted to be, and you're going to realize that's not where you want to be. There's more to it.

(Matt Joe at 00:21:00) And I think that that's just the exciting part of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:03) That is the beauty that, like, once you obtain it, you've already put in all of this work. It's like you have to become that person in your mind before your reality reflects it. And then by the time your reality reflects it, you're already in the future, like, past that.

(Matt Joe at 00:21:18) Yeah. Exactly. And so I remember maybe you had this experience growing up, but people had like a target high school that they really wanted to go to or a target university that they really wanted to go to. And I was always kind of jealous about that. I was like, oh, I wish I was that clear in wanting to go to Stanford or Notre Dame or, you know, I don't know, Oxford or wherever.

(Matt Joe at 00:21:40) You know? And then I realized, well, what happens if you don't get in? Or what happens if you, when you get in and then you get out because you're not going to stay there forever? Well, some people do, but, you know, whatever. But to each their own.

(Matt Joe at 00:21:53) Then what happens? You know? It's like, oh my gosh. Like, I hope you can redefine your goals, but I think it's more of the process of going through it and, again, just, you know, experiencing. That's all we got in life.

(Matt Joe at 00:22:04) End of the day, it's all experiences. So yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:08) So let's talk about, like, we have a lot of people that want to improve, that are constantly improving. That's why they listen to the show. Right? They're like, oh, let's listen to some great technology leaders. So let's say that we have got a leader who is like VP level, right, at VP, director style level, and they want to make that jump to C-level type role.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:29) Right? What sort of, off the top of your head, advice would you give to those people?

(Matt Joe at 00:22:34) Well, I mean, there's the traditional advice of becoming broader. You know, let's say we are in the technology space, because I can talk about the other space as well, but let's talk about the technology space. You probably became that person in that role because you were just darn good at something, you know, and you were trusted. And you could absorb change, and you can, you know, execute, really, and lead teams that can execute. I think at that point, the next style is really you're becoming a partner in the leadership team, and you have to understand and empathize with the other partners.

(Matt Joe at 00:23:10) It is almost like a cohort. Right? So what are we going to, how are we going to do this together? I know you're the CFO. I know you're the CISO.

(Matt Joe at 00:23:17) I know you're the, you know, CIO or whatever you are. You know? But how do we work together? And what am I doing to impact your world, and what are you doing to impact my world? You know?

(Matt Joe at 00:23:28) And you find some very interesting partnerships. So over the years, finance leaders have become my partners. HR leaders are my partners. I can usually tell when an organization is really innovative if their HR and their finance departments are innovative, and legal. Those are some key ingredients to actually becoming innovative.

(Matt Joe at 00:23:48) But I think it is that understanding of the rest of the business that is really key. I would actually almost say as well that you have to sort of be a Pied Piper in some ways of the younger generation. You have to be able to attract the talent. And I think that that's also really key that people put people in leadership positions when they can affect change and draw talent and have a certain gravity towards them. I don't want to say it's a black hole because it's not, but, you know, there's something that draws talent.

(Matt Joe at 00:24:17) You're a talent magnet, and you're a thought leader in the space, and you're a trusted partner to the business. You just naturally sort of bubble up. And I think that you have to be curious about the other parts of the business. You know? What can I do?

(Matt Joe at 00:24:31) Am I shifting budget that I have traditionally had into the HR department? And am I okay with it? Absolutely. I'm okay with it because it just allowed me to run like, you know, almost 50 events in our regions tied to innovation where our people were making things and inspiring people and all that kind of, well, that's a partnership. And then how do I fund that?

(Matt Joe at 00:24:52) Well, I have to make sure that I'm helping the regional general managers and regional executives understand that they could use their community budgets differently. It's just not beer and pizza. You could actually be bringing together diverse teams involving creative strategists, your HR department, your local marketing people, come up with great challenges and actually innovate. You know?

(Matt Joe at 00:25:13) Oh, that could be a community activity. You know? And those kinds of things are really, really interesting and fun. I think that being that idea generator, being a trusted partner just kind of elevates you there, right, in understanding the business, of course, because everybody has to understand their impact. And to be honest, you know, shipping that app probably wasn't the impact.

(Matt Joe at 00:25:33) Congratulations. You satisfy the requirements. It's GDPR-compliant. You know? But at the same time, it's like, okay.

(Matt Joe at 00:25:40) Well, the real impact was that we're able to do X, Y, Z thing. And, oh, by the way, those workers are much more effective or efficient. I don't want to say productive. I'd say efficient usually, or effective at their job. And you just bring it all together.

(Matt Joe at 00:25:54) You, again, there's execution components, but really, honestly, there's a lot of cultural components to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:00) I like it. That was actually a very good summary across the board of the different, like, areas that you have to pay attention to. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

(Matt Joe at 00:26:11) No. You've got to, you've got to watch if, you know, stuff around the ecosystem's real. Right? You know, you could think of it like your garden. If all of a sudden, you see less bees, take note.

(Matt Joe at 00:26:22) Something's going on. Right? And it's going to affect something. Same thing in the business landscape, whether or not it's your company or even your ecosystem. So we've really opened up our world to just not only the Microsoft products and SKUs.

(Matt Joe at 00:26:33) I think the cloud world really did that to us. But now you have all these partners and ecosystem players and IoT world and other things, and you've got to watch them too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:43) That is very interesting. I'm trying to wrap, I always try to wrap my mind around the consultancies because I'm like, I understand them, but then I don't.

(Matt Joe at 00:26:52) Yeah. Yeah. I kind of, yeah. You know, having grown up in it, and then, honestly, going into more of a product space for a while and then coming back in, it's really interesting. It is, if you like breadth and you want to know more about, if you're curious, honestly, like, broadly curious, consulting is amazing.

(Matt Joe at 00:27:12) You just, the number of buyers that you have to understand and empathize with across departments and industry, all the talent that you have to attract and retain and engage and bring together to make the most effective, innovative teams possible, you know, at a global scale. It's just very satisfying. It's, you know, people, it's not for everyone. You know, you could do consulting locally. You can do consulting regionally in area and globally, those kinds of things. But other people, you know, they just, they want to control that call button in that app, and that's their feature function, you know, and that could be okay.

(Matt Joe at 00:27:53) It's just not for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:54) I think the most interesting thing that I've learned about the podcast or about myself from the podcast and talking to all of these great leaders like you is that I'm more of like a consultant than I ever thought. Like, I never understood what it was. And then I realized, oh, I had an app company that did very well. It was small. We only had like 12, 15 people, but it went for like 10 years, and it did well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:17) It just was as big as I imagined it to be. But the thing I liked so much about it and the reason why I never got a job working like out of Microsoft or any other thing like that was because I loved going to meetings with the people, understanding their business problem, learning this entire industry and all of the details of it in a very short period of time, and then building solutions, and then going on to the next one. And so I developed this, like, tuning to myself where the way my brain operates where I'm most happy is when I'm learning massively complex things, understanding all the details, coming up with a solution, then essentially forgetting it all and moving on to the next problem.

(Matt Joe at 00:28:53) Oh, but I don't think you forgot it all. So I think that's the interesting thing. Yeah. Exactly. You discover these adjacencies.

(Matt Joe at 00:29:00) And yes, there are industries, and they have their own language. And, you know, nonprofits have their own language, you know, a patron, a constituent, or whatever. They have that. But there are such common cross-cutting horizontal things. You know, we used to have these industry slides and there's retail that's a pillar.

(Matt Joe at 00:29:20) Right? At some point, I think it was more of my consumer marketing, digital marketing world. I realized that retail was, we fell over. It's like this foundational thing because everyone's buying or selling something. I don't care what industry you're in.

(Matt Joe at 00:29:32) You're buying or selling something, and you're attracting something. You have brand traits, and you have brand values, and all these kinds of things, brand promises even in every transaction. Right? So I think that that was really cool. And to your point, you know, whether or not, and this is why I love working with Junior Achievement as a good example.

(Matt Joe at 00:29:50) Whether or not you acknowledge it or not and really embrace being an entrepreneur or not, you can be an entrepreneur in so many different scenarios, you know, within our company. I call it maybe an intrapreneur, or you can go out and do it on your own. And, you know, is it on to the next one, like the Jay-Z song? Yeah. And it's exciting.

(Matt Joe at 00:30:11) And the conversations only get better because you can say, oh, you know, we did this in this mining industry. Oh, you know, that could apply to telescopes. Or, you know, it's like, oh, let's go talk to them. You know? Or, oh, that client over there with their microscope, they could use the same sensing technology and computer vision as this security scenario that we're building in some other industry for this other company.

(Matt Joe at 00:30:35) And it's just building off of these ideas and finding the, you know, pivoting and rotating and finding those adjacencies that, I think it's just really, it's really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:44) That is exact, no, you make a good point. I did not forget it all. I forgot

(Matt Joe at 00:30:48) I forgot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:50) I did some of the bigger projects. I did insurance and then in finance, and so I had these huge structures of how 401ks work and all the details of how they all operate.

(Matt Joe at 00:30:59) Insurance claims. Oh my God. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:01) Yeah. Yeah. Different financial products, insurance rating algorithms, and then financial products were two huge areas that I spent two or three years in. And then I started to realize, well, I also play music, so I'm a big fan of music. And I'm like, it's hard to articulate all the time, but it's like everything's the same.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:18) And as you learn very deep structures in multiple disciplines, they're just all connected, and you're like, I could see exactly how they're like that.

(Matt Joe at 00:31:28) Yeah. I mean, eventually, you're gonna get sued by Marvin Gaye's family.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:31) Yeah. That makes sense. For my 401k insurance music product. Yeah.

(Matt Joe at 00:31:39) No. Yeah. It's everything's a riff. Right? But I think that with new capabilities and technology, the speed of that riff, the speed of the iteration, the quality of the insight. I mean, whether or not you think it's artificial intelligence or artificially smart or statistically probability, blah, it just comes fast. And then it becomes the art of what do you do about it. Right? And I think that goes back to what I was saying earlier. So if I can do something about it in an automated way or in an intelligent system that impacts humans or impacts the physical world, I think that's where it gets really fun.

(Matt Joe at 00:32:19) It just makes our lives a little different, more augmented, better, hopefully, more enjoyable, more human in some ways. So yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:30) I like it. And I'm also excited to see, I had this idea about—I don't know where this came from. Sometimes I just go with the flow. Right? So you're talking about robots and automation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:40) And so for a while, I was thinking for a month straight, who's gonna build the robot factories? It's like a closed loop. Robots that can build robots, but also mine the materials that can build robots.

(Matt Joe at 00:32:51) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:51) And I found that people think about this too.

(Matt Joe at 00:32:54) Oh, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:54) Yeah. Yeah.

(Matt Joe at 00:32:55) Oh, there's a way. There's a way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:58) And, you know, the way I found it was I was reading—I'm a big fan of SpaceX and, you know, going multiplanetary species, all that. But they were talking a lot about those as necessary requirements to go create mining civilizations of raw materials on other planets because you could set up robots that can mine and build. And I was like, I'm so glad that I'm not crazy, that these thoughts that pop into my head are also things that really smart people spend time thinking about.

(Matt Joe at 00:33:27) Yeah. Well, yeah. It's you can go crazy with it, though. I'm sure on a Saturday night, you can find your crazy use case. But, yeah, it's there's a purpose. There's a place for all this kind of stuff, and I don't think we have to be too fearful of it necessarily. And I do think that we are finding our ethical side of technology more so now, which is great to see, which is what we're actually investing in as well. It's, you know, just because you can, should you? You know, I think those are questions that we should bring up way early in the requirements gathering process as a whole. But, yeah, the robots are here.

(Matt Joe at 00:34:02) Are they as smart and as autonomous as we want them to be? No. We can probably thank some battery technology for that. We could take some battery technology, we'd be in much better shape.

(Matt Joe at 00:34:15) But, yeah, it's a fun world. It's a fun world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:19) So why did you choose battery technology over processing power, just out of curiosity?

(Matt Joe at 00:34:24) Well, because I think that you learn more when the devices are on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:33) I'm not gonna argue with that logic.

(Matt Joe at 00:34:35) Oh, it's like, oh, you know, we could totally process—well, the processing power requires battery, and the processing power has to have intelligence. And if we don't have the data, we can't have the intelligence. So what happens if they're all off and charging? I got a lot of hardware sitting and charging. You know, I think that the more they're used, the smarter they get.

(Matt Joe at 00:34:51) Then we'll know what to do with the processing power. Anyway.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:54) Do you think our—here's a random one, and we could actually edit this if you wanted out. But I was watching—I've been, I'll just geek out about energy or things like that and looking at the different efficiencies of different types of energy. And then I started researching about nuclear because if you start talking about energy efficiency, instantly nuclear is on the stage because there's way different types. But do you think our fear as a society of nuclear has held us back in energy?

(Matt Joe at 00:35:23) Yeah. Well, we've had some major societal scars from some of that experimentation. You know, that's a tough one because it involves so many ramifications, be it ecological, be it societal, all these kinds of things. But I think it is an option. I think if you can do it cleanly, you can do it safely. You know, I'm in the state of Washington. We have a massive waste issue in our state. That's a big issue, an unforeseen, unintended consequences issue. But, yeah, it can power submarines.

(Matt Joe at 00:36:02) Yeah. It can get us to space. Yeah. It should be in the portfolio, let's say, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:07) Yeah. Well, it is in our portfolio still. It's just when you're talking—

(Matt Joe at 00:36:11) We could invest more in it, honestly. I mean, there are better ways to do it. Other countries have found ways to do it. Whether or not it plays out in the long run, I think, is something we're still—I mean, our history is so short, you know, but how we play it out in the long run, ultimately, I think, will define in hindsight its effectiveness or not. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:33) I saw an aircraft carrier, and they're like, yeah, it has to refuel every 166 years or something. And I was like, that cannot be right. I don't think that's right math. They're like, no. It's a nuclear aircraft carrier. Yeah. And I was like, that's crazy. That's so much energy.

(Matt Joe at 00:36:48) But then you've got situations where submarines are underwater, you know, and have radiation levels much larger than we predicted. So I think some of this stuff's crazy and awesome and amazing. And, again, I think you have to look at the long tail of some of this stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:05) Yeah. Worst case, I grow some wings, you know, on my nuclear submarine.

(Matt Joe at 00:37:10) Yeah. You're a Marvel character. It's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:11) There you go. Come out of the submarine, fly out. Right? It's called the Iron Man submarine.

(Matt Joe at 00:37:18) Exactly. Oh, there you go. There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:21) Oh, man. This has been a fantastic conversation.

(Matt Joe at 00:37:26) Good. Well, I'm enjoying it. Yeah. We're all over the place, but it's fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:30) It's fun. It's not every episode is the same. I like to go with the person. I see a highly creative, very intelligent individual. And so with those, you know, it's amazing. I can never predict the exact value because I look at what episodes are most popular.

(Matt Joe at 00:37:47) Uh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:48) But we have a large—it's the law of large numbers. Right? We just have a large number of great people, and some do ridiculously well. Yeah. Yeah.

(Matt Joe at 00:37:57) Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that, hopefully, you know, I help you attract a new technologist. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:04) Well, actually, I think one of the most interesting things that has come from this is people will tell me. They say after the show, people have hired people that have listened to the show and said, I really like your style or your personality or what your company is doing. And so I've had people, past guests, call me up and say, hey, I forgot to tell you about eight months ago, I made one of the best hires ever. Someone was listening to your show, and we relocated them halfway across the world. Now they work for us. And I was like—

(Matt Joe at 00:38:32) Redirect them to me, please. I, we're growing at a fast clip. I need more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:37) So if they wanna learn more about the company, about you, where would they do that?

(Matt Joe at 00:38:42) Well, the best thing, honestly, is Avanade. You know, avanade.com, A-V-A-N-A-D-E. Nice made up word. You know? But I think that it's an okay site. I mean, not to be hard on ourselves, but it's a pretty traditional consulting site. It's got some awesome insight. We have our blog, Inside Avanade, and Insights blog. We publish a lot of our thought leadership there. A lot of my team, my content, if you go to the innovation site, it's a lot outdated because we're actually updating internally first and then expressing externally soon. A whole new approach, end-to-end approach on innovation, in particular, which is super exciting. It's all about doing the next thing now, enabling our own employees to do the next thing now, which is kind of our tagline at the moment. And because there's always a next. Right? We just talked about onto the next one. There's the reason that came up. You know? Don't you wanna be next? And how do you become almost aggressive about that? You know, basketball 101. Who's got next? Like, let's do it.

(Matt Joe at 00:39:36) And I think that's super exciting. So you can see our culture through that. You can see our Tech for Social Good program, corporate citizenship stuff. You know, not many people know about us, and that was initially by design, honestly, in the whole org design. And now it's like, we understand our brand actually has some cache now. We've won so many different awards in the industry from Microsoft, from others, that it's like, okay. We want something to be powered by Avanade and for it to mean something. Right?

(Matt Joe at 00:40:10) Intel inside, Avanade inside.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:13) I like that.

(Matt Joe at 00:40:14) If we bring in clients into our world, I want them to value that, you know, and be excited about coming into our innovation studios. And if we show up at the client, I want them to be excited about that. I want them to be on edge and say, what are they gonna show me? What is the art of my possible? You know, I think that's what we're all about. You can go to the website and check it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:37) Dude, it gets me excited. I love that. I'm asking those questions now. Like, oh, what's the possible? Like, let's do it.

(Matt Joe at 00:40:43) And that's the fun thing about it. Our angle on innovation is pretty practical. It's not just innovation for innovation's sake, and here's a greenfield blue sky thing, and here's the art of the possible. I like to say it's what is the art of their possible, the I and the R in parentheses, because I think that's more interesting. That's more exciting. It's, you know, these businesses are in business for a reason. They're successful and able to hire us for a reason. They could be doing so much more than they know it, and that's why they're with us. They're trying to understand what is possible with—how can I get inspired? How can I apply that inspiration to my business at speed? How can we co-investigate something together and then implement something together and then iterate on it together? I mean, there's just so much work to be done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:30) I liked that their thing so much that the other day at lunch, when I was reading it, I copied it and pasted it in my Evernote for use on the next slide deck we're gonna create when we go raise our next round of funding.

(Matt Joe at 00:41:45) Nice. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:47) Because I was like, oh, that's so good. Like, that is good. That it just, you know, when you're around it and it's in your profile or it's you see it come up, you lose that initial shock of it. I want you to know that when someone reads it for the first time, they're like, oh, man. That's good.

(Matt Joe at 00:42:04) Well, this is what it's about. See this? We're innovating together. Right? So I don't feel like I own any of that. It's all yours. You take it, and then you call me back. We'll figure out your next step, and then I'll get inspired by that. And it's give and get. Right? It's a good dialogue.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:18) Yes. And it's definitely how music works and how art works, how culture works. You're always building upon the past. And if you don't do that, you're almost not contributing correctly. Right?

(Matt Joe at 00:42:33) Well, yeah. And in technology, you know, we've learned our lessons on some of that stuff, you know, hoarding it, trying to own it, trying to profit off some of that stuff. It's not good. It's just not karmically good. And I think that, you know, the music analogy is perfect. Right? It's like jazz. Right? It's like, I got this. Alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:56) I like that. Well, the music industry is, somebody—my brother-in-law is a popular music producer, so I get a lot of music industry stuff from him. But one of the interesting things is, in business, you'll hear a lot of, oh, they took this or they're being secret about this. But in the music world, it's like everybody's like, oh, did you hear that Jay-Z's sick new beat? Like, what if we just made this one small change, get a slightly different beat, and now we've got something even cooler? And Jay-Z's like, bro, that's amazing. No one's like, I hate you for stealing. Everyone's like, there's plenty. Let's just make the best content we can make and let's all do it together. Plus, it's lonely if you hoard.

(Matt Joe at 00:43:36) Yeah. No. And you don't get inspired, and you just rinse and repeat. And at some point, you're playing a casino. You know? And it's just like, but let's make that amazing Grammy, you know, mix. You know, the once in a lifetime combination of artists, and all of a sudden, you got Mumford and Sons and Bob Dylan together. Is that what happened? I can't remember exactly. But it was just like, holy—oh my God. Like, I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:06) John Mayer just did, like, Dead and Company. He got the Grateful Dead and John Mayer together, and they go on tour as this band.

(Matt Joe at 00:44:13) Yeah. Because they're inspired by each other. Right? And then we'll take that, and they know their individual work would get better from it. And then tell the experience who they're gonna meet. It's great. Yeah. I think the technologist, the innovation side at least, is just like that. It's just like that. The entrepreneurs are just like that. You know, how'd you do that? How'd you get that funding? How'd you get that person? How'd you build that team? How'd you deploy that thing? You know? And then at some point, you realize, okay. I'm on to the next one, and it's okay. Sometimes it's within the company. Sometimes it's outside.

(Matt Joe at 00:44:42) When I left the company, I was perfectly fine. You know? It was a great adventure, and it was the right time. And coming back to this company was emotionally weird. You know? The call was like, I'm going back. You know? That's strange. I don't like to go backwards. But it was like, okay. But this is different. You know? It's different challenge, different opportunity. So same thing happens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:00) You guys have to license that song if that's the thing you're gonna roll out.

(Matt Joe at 00:45:03) Like, no. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:05) Play it at your events and stuff? On to the next one? That, yeah.

(Matt Joe at 00:45:09) Yeah, I have to say I have used it in an internal meeting once before. We'll edit that out. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:16) It was just your ringtone. It was just your ringtone.

(Matt Joe at 00:45:19) It just happened to be into the microphone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:21) This happened. Very loud ringtone.

(Matt Joe at 00:45:26) I'm sure we licensed it, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:28) You were on a nuclear submarine the night before, and it messed with your settings. Nuclear ringtone. It happened.

(Matt Joe at 00:45:35) Yeah. Well, it's my ringtone when Jay-Z calls me. Specifically. I mean, when Beyoncé calls me, it's different.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:41) Well, it has to be Beyoncé's song when she calls you. Otherwise, it's just rude. Exactly. When Bill Gates calls me, it's Clippy.

(Matt Joe at 00:45:53) Oh, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:56) "How can I help you?"

(Matt Joe at 00:45:57) It would be funny if you flip it, though. If all of a sudden, Beyoncé calls, and then it becomes a Ciara song. Or when Bill Gates calls, it's the Apple.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:07) I like it. I love it. Man, I am so excited right now. You got me in a good mood, but now I'm in a fantastic mood.

(Matt Joe at 00:46:17) Awesome. I don't even need coffee. I'm staring at my coffee cup right now. I needed coffee walking into this thing, but I'm pretty amped up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:26) Dude, this is awesome. Oh, real quick. Will you give context as we wrap? We have to wrap up now, but will you—how big is the company?

(Matt Joe at 00:46:34) So we are the leading digital innovator in the Microsoft ecosystem, period. We have over 35,000 employees operating in over 20 countries. We have our whole network of digital innovation studios. Those are really our next kind of delivery model that is just awesome as far as attracting talent, retaining talent, sharing knowledge, incubating new skills. Just having that community is so important.

(Matt Joe at 00:46:58) That's really the scale. We operate in most geographies that you would expect, growing. I think in the future, you'll hear new countries that we'll be in. And so if we're not where you want to be today, we'll probably be where you're going to go. And in our other world, because we are a joint venture across Accenture and Microsoft, about 19 years old now, we can also work where they are.

(Matt Joe at 00:47:21) So Accenture is obviously a bigger company. Microsoft is obviously a bigger company. We get access to their technology centers on the Microsoft side. We are really powering the Accenture Microsoft Business Group, which is something they just announced. So we're going to be everywhere.

(Matt Joe at 00:47:36) The growth trajectory is kind of sick. It's a challenge, and it's an exciting challenge. But to be honest, Microsoft, I think, is growing even faster than us. So they're giving us the playground to play in. It's just our job and our responsibility to step into it and fulfill the promise of it.

(Matt Joe at 00:47:54) And so I think that's probably a good place to start as far as describing what we do and where we are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:00) I love it. And then go to the website. We'll post it in the show notes. Click on careers. Learn more about it.

(Matt Joe at 00:48:06) Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know what? Just network with us. We're at the conferences. We're at the user groups. Meet someone at Avanade. We are different. We are not Microsoft. We are not Accenture. We have our own orange culture. Go orange or whatever you want to call it. But it's real, and it's something that actually brought me back to the company as well. And it's a fantastic place to just get inspired and learn and hone your craft, hone your skill. At some point, unlearn it all, and then take on something new.

(Matt Joe at 00:48:37) I mean, it's just a fantastic place to be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:41) I love it. Well, thank you so much, Matt. Next time I'm out in Seattle, I'm going to look you up and let you know I'm coming out there. Maybe say hello.

(Matt Joe at 00:48:50) Absolutely. You know, I run a bunch of events around the world, not only in the regions, but with clients. And also, we have this big Innovate Summit that we—we just had it in Milan, for example. Global innovation contest came in, keynote speakers. Would love to consider you as a speaker in one of our events in the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:06) Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I'll have Chloe send you the speaker reel. This is crazy. When the podcast took off, I gave 40 talks around the world this year.

(Matt Joe at 00:49:14) Exactly. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:14) Sweden and stuff. It's amazing.

(Matt Joe at 00:49:16) Yeah. I think I would love to get you in front of our people. I think you'd really like it. I think they'd learn from you. And, you know, well, this is what it's all about. You're a new friend.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:27) Woo hoo. High five. Virtual high five. There we go.

(Matt Joe at 00:49:30) Boom. Gorgeous.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:31) That was the first time I've ever done that, by the way.

(Matt Joe at 00:49:33) Well, we just did it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:34) It worked. It worked. Boom. Alright, Matt. I'll talk with you soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:40) Have a fantastic rest of your day.

(Matt Joe at 00:49:42) You too. You too. Take care.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:43) See you, bud. Bye. 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 would 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.