Shifting From Career Mode to Coaching Mode with Nick Calver, VP at Palo Alto Networks

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Nick Calver, VP of Financial Services at Palo Alto Networks, about his greatest leadership insights from over twenty years in leadership. Thank you to Fin for sponsoring this episode. To learn more about the number one AI agent for customer support, go to fin.ai/cto. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:27) One of the things that caught my attention about you was that in the prep documents that we have, it makes a point to say that it's not about just the amazing career, it's now about helping other people. How did that come about?

(Nick Calver at 00:00:43) That's a great question. I guess as we, in my younger career, start studying, there's the ambition, there's the drive. The big thing that motivates me is about making a difference. And that's making a difference at work, making a difference at home, and just talking to Josh about, I'm going to coach a load of children playing soccer tonight. I know for the UK watchers, it'll be football, but for the world, it's soccer. And that it's all about that. But then I think I reached a stage in my career, maybe late thirties, early forties, where the personal ambition is, you then start to actually think about maybe legacy and thinking about other people. So how can I help other people? And there's been a few occurrences in my career where I've worked or had people work for me who then worked alongside me, who then overtaken me. And there's nothing more satisfying. You know, if you can help somebody grow, I guess it's like my children. I tell my children to stand on my shoulders. And what I mean by that is wherever I've got, I want them to climb up. I want them to use me as support to actually grow and make a more positive difference to the world. It's about helping others. So there's very much been this thing in the career and the workplace, but also then outside of that. And I work with an amazing guy called Dr. Paul Stoltz, who's American and Californian-based. And he does lots of books on overcoming adversity, but he's also in a similar, a similar positive intention. How can we actually help others? How can we help them meet their objectives? How can we help them be more satisfied in life? And I could go into a whole lot of things on Paul with the adversity quotient where he starts to, he looks at your IQ, your intelligence, which we were talking about earlier, your EQ, which everybody's familiar with, your emotional intelligence. And then your AQ is your adversity quotient, and he's scientifically proven that people with a high AQ, which can be measured, are happier, are healthier, and more successful. And they, I would expect them to actually give back to society. So, yeah, it's been an interesting journey, but it's very much about trying to help others, my family and the wider community as a whole, and in the workplace, certainly people who work for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:10) So adversity quotient. I like that. I have not heard that.

(Nick Calver at 00:03:14) Yeah. No, Dr. Paul Stoltz, he wrote, I'm trying to, yeah, how to harness the power of adversity. He wrote another book called True Grit. He also coached the, or helped coach the US Olympics team last year or last time. So he's been involved in actually helping that. And he also helped one of the first blind mountain climbers to ascend Everest. I think it's a guy called Eric Weihenmayer who, how you climb Everest blind? I don't know. How you climb Everest, full stop? I don't know. But so he's a remarkable human being, but it's all about just making things happen and focusing on what's important. I guess he talks about sort of standing back, looking at the wider environment, understanding the context of something, and then bringing ideas together so you can analyze it, then coming up with solutions. And interesting, he'll say, so, Nick, what could you do to make sure this doesn't happen? You maybe come up with three or four different ideas. And so what's one specific thing you think you could do that will make a difference, even be a small difference? And what he's doing is using your brain and just helping your brain process masses of information, which we often are presented with. Bring it down, narrow it down into a single action, and getting you to take ownership and assigning ownership and then getting a date. So you really, it's, I guess it's like compressing a big program down into sort of single tasks ultimately. But those tasks are about helping people develop, helping people face into adversity, and face into those challenges. I could talk for the whole hour on that, and I know you want to cover some other stuff, so I'll let you know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:02) I'm curious, though. We'll just let the conversation go where it goes. So have you ever, has he ever been an official mentor? Like, have you engaged him as a coach, or do you just consume his content and hang out with him?

(Nick Calver at 00:05:14) So when I was 40 years old, 39, 40 years old, I was at a company called Aviva. And Aviva had 30,000 employees all around the world. And for whatever reason, I was identified as one of the top 100 leaders in the company. So I was shipped off to this hotel in London, as you know, we all go to these hotels for conferences. And I was locked away in a room with Paul and 100 other people for three or four days. To give you some context, just before I was shipped off, I'd been offered a job at Lloyds Bank, so I resigned. I wrote my resignation letter and handed that in. And it was quite interesting. My boss at the time, a great guy called Malcolm Simkin, said, Nick, I know you resigned, but why don't you go on the course? It will help you develop. It will give you some new skills, and it may change your mind, but I want to invest in you. And Malcolm is very much about that. So I went on the course, and Paul taught us a lot. He talked, he anchors lots of things in climbing and those sorts of analogies. And he talks about in life, you're walking up a mountain, and there's a storm coming in. The storm will come into your face. And it's, what do you do at that point? Do you sort of hunker down and, I'm using the US term there. I'd say crouch down, but getting the multilingual there, hunker down behind a mound and just wait and wait for the storm to pass. Or do you just stand tall and stand proud and walk towards the storm and face into it? And maybe bring others and have their support, and you push into it. Because in reality, I guess life is that constant storm, and there's that constant back to, and I love walking in the mountains. I don't know about you, but I'm often walking in the mountains with my children. You get to the top of a hill, and they say, is that it, Dad? And then just as you get to the brow of the hill, you see the next hill, which is higher and a bit further away, and you just keep on going because that's what life is about. By going on these journeys and climbing up these mountains, you're getting the experience, you're learning, and you're actually also when you're doing it with other people, you're growing together. I think that's a great thing to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:30) Yeah. You're reminding me when I got to the top of my first mountain, I was like, oh, okay. So it takes a decade. Like, that's what that's what it feels like. Because when you're in your, I'm 37, when you're in your, you know, teens and then your twenties, the ambition and the drive and trying to achieve this thing, and then you finally get to it. And then it's actually very weird because you're like, what, the only other thing to do is to go down and climb another mountain. It's like, alright. Well, now I'm going to go climb another mountain, but I'm going to do it better this time because I have all my experience from getting to the top of the first one.

(Nick Calver at 00:08:07) Yeah. No. Definitely. So it's just great fun, and that's true of life. And when I had my first son, and that was a big mountain, it took a few years to have my first son, and then we went down the mountain again, and we had twins after that. And one of the twins is the painting behind me. So yeah. So it's good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:24) Oh, nice. You got one boy, two girls?

(Nick Calver at 00:08:28) The twins are one girl, one boy. And then the eldest is a boy. So yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:34) Okay. I've got two boys and one girl as well.

(Nick Calver at 00:08:36) Oh, fantastic. Yeah. It's a good mix. Little girl, nature and nurture, they're both, the twins brought up exactly the same, but lovely kids, but different personalities. So.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:48) Oh, they're so different. Ours are really close in age. They're eighteen months apart. So.

(Nick Calver at 00:08:55) Yeah. Oh, I love that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:55) So last question on adversity before we wrap up, and it might be a tough one. What's the greatest adversity you have ever faced in your life? It could be personal. It doesn't have to be work related.

(Nick Calver at 00:09:09) On, it's interesting. On the personal side, I'll cover both, actually, if that's good. Yeah. The personal side is my son. We had seven years of IVF to achieve having our first child. The emotional roller coaster that we went on through those seven years was extraordinary. And my eldest son doesn't appreciate how much work we put into creating him and what a pain he is now, but he's a good kid. You then come into the adversity at work. It comes into a people thing. So I manage lots of people. I manage 500, 2,000, whatever, as lots of other leaders have. And I took a call one day where one of my team had committed suicide. And I think I was in my early thirties, and to get a call from my lady called Hazel, is a friend in HR, and to say that this person had committed suicide. That was a shock. And then dealing and processing with what happened to him, you go through the questions of could I have done anything? I think everybody always thinks that. And then, okay. So how are we going to manage, how are we going to help his team? How are we going to help his family? It was, yeah. That's something tough, and I don't think any management school trains you for that. But I think you probably learn through life about, and you build up your own personality. So that was a tough one. But I had some great people I worked with and some great guidance. And yeah, we got through it, and their family got through it. But that was a really tough one. And with suicide, as we know, in the world increasing, and then it's, yeah, it's something that's sort of very close to me now. And unfortunately, I know probably everybody knows people who have taken their lives. And yeah, if there's anything I can do to help prevent that or just get that message out, that's something I'd definitely support.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:13) Yeah. Maybe Josh can find a link for the show notes for some.

(Intro Narrator at 00:11:17) That would be good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:18) Resources there.

(Nick Calver at 00:11:19) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:20) And I'd say, and thank you so much for sharing that.

(Nick Calver at 00:11:24) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:25) I know it's always tough when you get asked, what's the most difficult thing that has ever happened in your life? But I think it's important because you brought up adversity. And for me, I believe my life has been the most shaped by the choices I make in the most difficult moments.

(Nick Calver at 00:11:44) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:45) So for me, my two, I'd have to say is when I was 11, 12, I got hit by a car, and I was in a wheelchair for a year. And then halfway through my recovery, I fell and rebroke my legs. And so it was quite the, quite the difficult thing. And so learning how to walk again, that's one of those moments where your legs are atrophied. There's sticks, and you have to rebuild them from the ground up. And you want to give up so bad. Like, you want to not do it. You're like, ah, but you have to make your fork in the road situation. You have to make a choice. You either let the story define you as the worst thing and this is why you have all these problems, or just overcome it. And so I'd say that I'm lucky, I'm blessed, whatever you want to call it, that I, at that young age, I chose to overcome it, but then that created a pattern, and then as more difficult things happened later in life, I could compare it to that. I was like, okay, this is hard, but it's not as hard as learning how to walk again. Like, I'll be okay.

(Nick Calver at 00:12:47) No. That's fantastic. That's incredible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:51) And then my second one was, like, mid-late twenties. My mom had a stomachache, went to the hospital, and within three weeks, she passed away. The silver lining there is I got to hold her hand and say goodbye to her as she passed. But that moment was, there's no words I could say to people to express how you feel and how you realize and understand that life is finite when you hold someone's hand as they pass. It's a really unique experience, and then it caused me to value time more.

(Nick Calver at 00:13:28) It's interesting. Are you okay if I tell you a funny story about death? Or a story about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:33) Yeah.

(Nick Calver at 00:13:33) So my father passed on November 5, two years ago, and he had a brain hemorrhage. He collapsed, taken to hospital while he was still alive, and he was in a sort of do not resuscitate. And my brother, my sister, my mom, in a room, I was holding his hand. And the nurses said, you probably been there, they said, the breaths will take longer, and then they'll stop. And there's a clock on the wall. And I'm an IT guy, so I'm always looking at time and motion and things. And I was sort of figuring out in my brain, yeah, there's four seconds gap and then ten seconds and then fifteen. And I could see it reasonably quickly progressing. And then twenty seconds. And then it went to thirty seconds, and then it went up. And I got up, let go of his hand, said to my brother, he's gone. And about forty-five seconds later, he took another breath, and we just, we couldn't help but sort of just smile. And he was always stubborn, and he just had to take that one last breath in at forty-five, and that was it. But so you know what it's like.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:40) Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then that just causes you to value life in a different way. I think more is not even the right word. It's just different.

(Nick Calver at 00:14:49) Yeah. And appreciate the time that my mom's still there, so I see her every week, and that's important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:55) Dude, we're getting deep at the beginning of an episode. This usually happens at the end.

(Nick Calver at 00:15:00) We can go to the business now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:02) No. But this is good. I'm glad I get to know you. Honestly, I've resonated with many of the things that you've said. So, for example, me with growing, my background's pretty simple, built and sold three businesses and then started the podcast and did it in the software space.

(Nick Calver at 00:15:17) But it's not pretty simple. I mean, you're being modest. You're being, that's not simple, but that's fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:24) Yeah. But what happened was at first, it was the product and the energy and the momentum and then, of course, the money. Anyone who doesn't say that that's important is just, they're just leaving it out. And so that was so exciting and that would get, and then the growth, like, growing as a leader. And then what I found is that two things that can't be completely filled, like, you can't achieve it and just have the status, is growing as a leader. It's something that's always happening. So that's very enjoyable for me. Like, always becoming just slightly better. And the second, or at least trying to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:00) And the second thing is watching the other people grow. I did not know how rewarding it would be, Nick, to hire someone who was working at a dog groomer and watch them become a personal assistant and then all the way to the head of sales and then running sales. Watching that person grow through the company was like making a bet on someone and watching it work out because they had good solid core. That's rewarding.

(Nick Calver at 00:16:24) And it's them maybe growing as a human being and an individual as well, and it's where they're helping other people. Because they learn the skills, and humility is probably a really valuable skill. When I meet and talk with the CEOs, CIOs, I don't see myself as any better. So if I meet a CIO of a small company, I'll know better than him. And if I meet a CEO of a huge company, then I better—we're all different. We're all human beings. We're here with our purpose. But I think it's maybe having that mutual respect and really importantly, listening to people—listening to, as we're doing that, listening to their story, learning from that, maybe picking up some nuggets of information, and then you're using that. The adversity—my children, they get quite sort of frustrated sometimes when I'm teaching them about adversity and look at the positives. Okay, so there's a challenge here, but there's also an opportunity. And just think how you always visualize. I don't know, have you ever run a marathon, Joel?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:34) No, I haven't run a marathon.

(Nick Calver at 00:17:37) So neither have I.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:38) Josh has, though. Josh is a marathon runner.

(Intro Narrator at 00:17:41) Oh no, only half marathon.

(Nick Calver at 00:17:43) Okay. But it's still close enough. Yeah. But it's with any event, and it could be a work event or a marathon or something. It's—somebody's talking to you when they ran the London Marathon, and you get to that last 100 meters or 25 yards or something, and you're coming in and you see your family and just trying to bottle up or just shutting your eyes and just feeling the emotion, the passion, the success when you get there. That's something that's quite extraordinary. And if you can help other people visualize that, then when they're facing—visualize the outcome, the positive outcome, the positive feelings. But I guess in reality, now when I'm talking to customers, it's about communicating the positive outcomes that they'll get from working with us. So when the guys ask me to come and talk to you, it's about the positive outcomes from this conversation. As long as it's mutually beneficial, I think that's something that's important to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:32) I fully agree. I think one of the hardest things in life is to keep the main thing the main thing. Because you have this vision, you want to do this big thing, and then you get—you have to focus on details to achieve details, but then you have to come back out and constantly remind yourself. One of the best things that I've learned that helps me with this all the time—I learned it from some Navy SEAL I watched on YouTube or something. He said HALT, H-A-L-T. Have you heard this one before?

(Nick Calver at 00:19:02) No, I haven't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:03) Okay. HALT, acronym: hungry, angry, lazy, or tired. If you're any of those things, don't make any decisions. If you're hungry, if you're angry, if you're lazy, or you're tired, just HALT. Just stop. Go get some rest. Go get some food. Relax. Because the worst decisions I've ever made in my life, I was hungry, angry, lazy, or tired. I was just like, "Ah, screw it. I'm tired." And that's really bad.

(Nick Calver at 00:19:31) I like that. We're going to take another—so I've got something to take away from you, which is good. So thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:38) Yeah, passing it along from the Navy SEALs. Because, to your—the reason why I thought of that is because you were talking about essentially training to failure. You have to get to the point where your body wants to quit and then get it to continue to go through the vision of what's to come. Right? And they're training to failure all the time. Right?

(Nick Calver at 00:19:57) I train to failure four times a week in the gym. So I do try to train a lot. Yep. Yeah. And I certainly train to failure. Another quick story with bench press. I'm trying to think weight-wise, 260 pounds. Just—I can lift some 260 pounds on there. Push the bar up, and the bar—the right-hand side hit the bench. So the left-hand side went up. The bar on the right came down and broke my ribs, and then had a very slim waist. So I love the gym. I love the exercise. It's great. Exercise is so important for mental and physical well-being. But yeah, don't be silly like I was and drop 200-plus pounds on your chest. It's not a good move.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:45) How long did that take you to recover?

(Nick Calver at 00:20:48) Being the overcoming adversity and stubborn person, I got up off the—my friends lifted the weight off. I got up off the bench. I was struggling to breathe, but I thought I'm just going to work my way through this. So I went over to another machine, a pec deck. It's true. And got on there and pushed the arms together. And I was really struggling to breathe, but I didn't want to show anybody in the gym. So I just sort of calmly put it back, said, sort of waved goodbye, walked to the car, rang my wife, and said, "Yeah, I'm coming home. I'm okay, but don't worry if it looks like I'm struggling to breathe." So, yeah. But it's just—I've broken a lot of bones over the years with various rugby and motorcycles and stuff like that. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:40) You sound like if you lived in Tennessee, we'd hang out. Real quick, thank you to Fin for sponsoring this episode. Fin is the number one AI agent for customer service with a 65% average resolution rate. Fin is built to handle complex, multi-step queries like returns, exchanges, and disputes, delivering high-quality personalized answers just like your best human agent. Fin is trusted by over 5,000 customer service leaders and top AI companies, including Anthropic and Synthesia. Fin works on any help desk. You don't have to overhaul your current system to get the best AI agent for customer service. Priced at only 99 cents per resolution with a 90-day money-back guarantee. If you're ready to transform your customer service experience, find out how at fin.ai/cto. Let's talk about this credit card migration crisis. Tell me about that.

(Nick Calver at 00:22:38) Yeah. So I was at Lloyds Bank—Lloyds—and we merged with some banks and we divested. And it was 30 million customers in the UK, so the biggest retail bank. And we transferred also—we were at that time—I think it's TSB Covia Bank was transferring all the funds across via Lloyds. So we were the hub of the US money coming into Europe at that point. But we—one weekend, we did a number of migrations and consolidations. We had it down to a military exercise. So what we do is we'd rehearse, and we'd rehearse to a point and then back out. So you have five, 10 weekends where you're doing 24-hour shifts, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, to just practice and rehearse. And so we were at a point where we were migrating about 15 million customers across on their credit cards. And you know, everyone's got a balance on their credit card. Everyone's got their numbers. So every penny, every cent has to be accounted for. And I was running the incident side of things, and there's a great leader called Peter Hayes actually running the actual migration. And we got to the go/no-go point. And I think it was about 1:00 in the morning on a Sunday morning where we knew that if we didn't go forward, we'd have to back out because it took so much time to get everything back to it as it was, restore it, and test it all. And so the 1:00 call was absolutely critical. We all got around this table, and you go around the table, and everyone's saying, "Yes. Yeah, we're good to go." And there's this one guy at the table, and he was young, in his twenties, thirties. And he had the courage to say, "No. We're not good to go." So, "Okay. So what was that?" And so, "The numbers don't add up. You know, what we started with, we've now got less. There's something—something's not right." So suddenly, everybody wanted to talk to him. Everybody wanted to question him. And Peter and myself just sort of protected him. And said, "Right, you need to go off"—and I called him Simon—"You need to go off and just double-check your figures. Double-check your facts. And then we will make a decision." And Pete said, "How long have we got?" We really had to make a decision by 2:00. 2:00 was going to be tight, but we could maybe squeeze it in. So about 25 past one, Simon stuck his head—"Nick, come over." And he said, "I've made a mistake." He said, "The figures do add up." I said, "Oh, woah. Okay." So he—we made the mistake. Fine. He went through—I got into double-check again because you don't want to make a mistake two or three times. Double-checked again. It was good. We're good to go. So we had the call at 2:00, go/no-go. Everyone stuck their hand up, all good, and it went. And so the migration happened, all the credit cards were—no customer knew anything about it because it all happened overnight when systems were down. But the bit that—several things sort of stuck in my mind and the real learning thing to think as a leader. One is that that young man, the strength, the courage that he had to stand in front of all these very senior, very old, very powerful people and stop. And there was 300 people on site. All the work they'd done, he just said, "Sorry. Your work's not good enough because the numbers don't." That took a lot of courage to stand up and do that. And so really proud of him to do that. And then it probably took just as much or even more courage to say, "I made a mistake." Yeah. I did everything with the best intention, and people often say, you don't come to work to do a bad job. That's true. You come to work to do a good job. He did everything with the best intention. He made a mistake. We've all worked with spreadsheets. It happens. So that was good. But the other thing was about Peter and the way there wasn't the sort of "What on earth are you doing?" What it was—100% supportive. Pete's an experienced guy. Let's give this guy some room. Let's protect him. Let's give him a buffer. He doesn't need to be deviated from his task. He just needs to focus on it. Let's look after him. And then after we'd actually communicated, there was no criticism of him. It was supportive. He got bought more beer. I appreciate it. It was 8:00 Sunday morning. We got back to hotel. And maybe you shouldn't drink at 8 a.m., but we had been working through the night. Everybody was buying him pints. He became a sort of hero, really, ultimately, because of that courage and that behavior. And yeah, he's gone on to have a successful career. But it's those difficult moments where you sometimes have to make difficult calls, and you just have to pause and stop and support your colleagues, support people, help them, give them what they need. And you can get through this together, but it's that team effort as well. So there's a load of stuff there. I don't know whether you want to extract anything or ask any questions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:58) No, I can totally respect that individual for them standing up and—that's a hard thing to do. Yeah. Especially earlier on in your career, especially when everyone's so much more senior than you.

(Nick Calver at 00:28:10) Yeah. And these were several levels more senior. So—but yeah, all credit to him and, yeah, I wish him all the best.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:19) That was—you had me on the edge of my seat, man. I was like, is this thing—is this a banking crisis that's going to happen? Did this take down London for 24 hours or something?

(Nick Calver at 00:28:29) Their payment network. But I've had those as well. So we could go into whichever ones you want. So data centers going—

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:37) Tell me about the greatest outage you've ever been a part of.

(Nick Calver at 00:28:42) Oh, that's not a good thing, is it? But I just—so I ran all the data centers. It was one of the things—I was in charge of all the data centers for Lloyds. And got a call from a guy called Lawrence Robinson who worked for me, ran the data centers, and was physically there, and said, "We just lost power." A bit like the recent event at Heathrow, but we handled it a lot better at the time. So when you lose power, you've got battery. The battery will run the data center for 30 minutes, and you've got—we had three generators on site. The generators would kick in within 10 seconds. So the batteries were just there for a quick switchover. The generators had a day tank of diesel. Each of the generators, they'd run for a day and we had 30 days' supply of diesel. So losing mains power is not really an issue. It just flicks over, generators kick in. So we lost power, generators kicked in. Then 10 minutes later, Lawrence calls me and says, "We just lost a generator." So we had two left. The site could survive on one, but it was tight. So I got in the car, and it's about 120 miles from where I live to the data center. Got in the car and started driving towards the data center. And as I was sort of driving, it was just weighing through my mind, the process and stuff. And then the phone went again, it's Lawrence. And Lawrence said, "We just lost the second generator." And you know, you're accountable. The data center's my data center. I am accountable. I felt personally accountable. We've done everything possible. All the engineering was in place, but things were just going wrong. And you could almost see, like, the bridge falling away in some of these movies and stuff. And so I got on the phone to one of the senior execs at the bank to say, "Here's the situation. We could be going to lose something here. We've got procedures in place. We're ready." And then whilst I was on the phone, the phone went, and it was Lawrence. So I had to drop the exec off the line in the good old days of car phones when I'm sure I was driving on my phone, which you're not allowed to do now. And passed the phone in. The third generator had gone. That was it. We were on battery. We had 27 minutes of power, and we had 27 minutes to shut the data center down as calmly and in such a controlled way that you wouldn't get data corruption, et cetera. So it was the Mission Impossible with the fuse going across. So you know what to do? Let's just start shutting things down. Went back on the phone to the exec. Obviously, the exec's—everybody's upset, but it was a situation. And so, yeah, got to the data center. The data center was dark. Mains power came back online. We had engineers calling all over. We'd failed over to the other data center. So some services were there. Some services—we're in the middle of recovery. It took probably a good 12 hours to get back to normal. And when you think all the banking systems, the good stuff is in banking. There's lots of failover procedures. So if you lose a system, if the banking systems are down, there's credit card failover, which will basically mean you can still use your credit card. You can still get cash out, et cetera. But that was—that was not good. And there was a—basically, it turned out there's a fuel problem, which hadn't been picked up even though they were tested and stuff.

(Nick Calver at 00:32:28) That's some contaminated fuel that got in, and that caused a problem. However much you test and however much you stress test things, things do go wrong. That's probably the worst. There was the Olympics event, but I don't know whether we can come on to that later or we can come on to that now if you want.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:47) Well, did that happen during the Olympics?

(Nick Calver at 00:32:50) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:51) What happened during the Olympics?

(Nick Calver at 00:32:53) So, 2012 Olympics. Lloyds were the financial services partner for the 2012 Olympics. So we provided all financial services, all cash points. We had some branches. They had a ring of steel around Stratford, around the actual Olympic Stadium. And so you couldn't get equipment in, you couldn't get equipment out. And I was accountable for all the IT services. That was my job. And it was great for my children because we got to go and see events, and they lent us a torch and all these sort of positives.

(Nick Calver at 00:33:30) But the Olympics opened on the Friday. On the Sunday, I had about 40 or 50 friends over for a barbecue because it's the Olympics. We're going to celebrate and all that sort of thing. And again, the phone went. It's about 6:30. The phone went. There were a lot of people there, and there had been a lightning strike on one of the branches. So there were two branches in the ring of steel. One was for the public, one was for journalists. And there had been a lightning strike at the journalist branch, which had fried everything. The light bulbs had popped, all the servers, all the PCs. It was down. That branch served 60,000 journalists. And can you imagine being the person accountable for servers for 60,000 journalists when it doesn't work on the first Monday of the Olympics? That wasn't something I wanted my name to be on the front of the global press.

(Nick Calver at 00:34:29) So we had some great partners. We had Computacenter, who were the partner at the time for the Olympics, and they worked with me. A great guy called John Beard, James Bishop. Some of the guys at Computacenter were exceptional that night. And we worked through the night. They replaced everything. They replaced light bulbs, they replaced PCs, servers. They even replaced the coffee machine and the kettle. They did everything. And it was something like 6:47 a.m. when the systems were all back and all tested, and the branch opened at seven. And at 7:00, people came in, journalists were in, they never knew anything had happened, and I went to bed. But that was just a tough night. And good friends manned the barbecue. They had the party without me around my house, and I just stayed in my study and just worked through the night. But yeah, I guess there's lots of—there's going to be loads of those stories in lots of arenas and other people's lives where you don't realize what's actually going on behind the scenes, and people are working tirelessly to just keep things running smoothly. And, you know, I guess we've got it with our armed forces, the medical people, doctors, nurses, so many people who just work so hard for other people. So it was just my turn that evening to sit there and direct the recovery. But yeah, it was interesting, good fun, a learning experience, and great teamwork as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:03) Yeah. I was with a friend at lunch yesterday, and he was having trouble with Airbnb, like the texting thing not working. He couldn't book the hotel room. And for me, he was a nontechnical person, and I was like, you know what? My empathy goes to the engineering team. Like, I'm sure they're aware of this. It's probably complete chaos right now trying to figure out maybe their text message service went down for two-factor or whatever it was. But they were going through some stuff, and he's like, I just don't understand why it won't work. I was like, dude, we're bouncing light on fiber optic cables under the sea around the world in milliseconds. I was like, just give the nerds a break.

(Nick Calver at 00:36:44) Pretty good. I got Starlink. Starlink's just amazing. I've got landline, and I've got Starlink. And yeah, that's just what great technology, and it just works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:53) Let's talk a little bit about core values in people development. Coaching. Do you do a lot of coaching?

(Nick Calver at 00:37:00) I do. I guess we talked earlier. I do the kids' soccer. So there's that side. And in the UK, you have to be trained with the FA, and they look at the different elements. So with the football, you're training their technical skills, you're giving them physical exercise. Also, there's the psychology and the teamwork there. So there's lots of things. But then from the work side, the scoop and—this wasn't prepared. There's—sorry, get the right camera. This is linked to the Paul Stoltz that we talked about earlier. And this is where—I'll just show you some of the solid cards. So basically, what that is, there's a pack of cards. You can sort of read "being challenged." I'll just pick a bright—and the other says title, position, status. So what it is, the core values here is you take a couple hundred cards, lay them out on the table, and ask people to just pick five or six of them. And what you're doing is lots of them are similar, but you're helping people focus in on what's important to them. Because how often do you sit there and think, what are the five most important core values to me?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:18) Not often.

(Nick Calver at 00:38:18) No. So you get down to basically a set, and quite often people will pick up, "I can't decide on five," so they pick up 10. So you then talk them through it. You get them to just compress it, get it down. But it's not actually the words that are written on the card. It's your interpretation in your mind about what's actually important to you. And Paul will probably have a heart attack if he hears me talking in this way because he's so much better at it than I am. But you get down to that core set of values. And then from there, you can identify something called a deal breaker. So for me, making a difference has always been consistent. I've been using those cards personally for 20 years. Fifteen, 20 years now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:09) Where do you get them?

(Nick Calver at 00:39:10) I got them through going on that course. But you can just get them on Amazon and things. So it's called The Real Deal. But it's interesting when you start—that core value of me of making a difference. The other values, when I was sort of 40, the other values should be ambition and reward and career growth and teamwork. And then now I'm in my mid to late fifties, you start to think health, family, helping others, teamwork. So it probably ties all the way back to that conversation we had right at the beginning about helping others, helping others develop, helping others grow. So there's the health element, absolutely. There's family. And I think as we go through our careers and we work so hard and we travel so much, getting that balance with the family, I've definitely got that wrong over the years. Is it better than it was now? Is it perfect? No. But that's just me. I love work. But this exercise to get your core values, I think, is really useful. And there's a lady, I'll say her first name called Stacy. I worked with her at one company, and she knew about me and these cards. And we went through and identified her core values, and she just got a VP job offered to her at the company. So it's a promotion. And she looked at her core values, and what we do is measure them now. Say, I have a scale of one to 10. What does this look like, and what does that look like? And so we went around and I said, "So now put yourself mentally in that new role. Where do they sit?" And four out of her five cards reduced, which was sort of fascinating. The one that went up was what she called security, but was actually money because there was a good pay rise. There was a good package, but that money gave her and her family security, which is fine. But the other stuff and her deal breaker about sort of helping others and teamwork and all those things, they dropped because the role was going to change the dynamic there. And again, a really brave thing that she did, she turned the job down. You know, we always apply—when you're ambitious, you apply for jobs, you try and get promotions, which she did. She secured it. She succeeded to get that promotion. And then she turned it down. And I've spoken to her, and she's happy, and she's enjoying life. But when you go through the exercise and somebody takes that decision, there's always that, "I hope I coached her in the right way there." But I think that her family, the happiness is there. But knowing your core values and knowing what they are and then aligning your work and your life to those, because core values in life with the family, okay, they're there and we love your children, look after your children, raise them to have the right values and things. But then when if work takes you away too much from those core values, then it sort of helped me question, is this actually the right thing? Is this something I want to do? And there's a nice thing actually about Palo Alto, Palo Alto Networks. I was contacted, one of the first contacts when I before I joined by a lady called Liz Kane, who's the HR director. And Liz, I'd worked with before at a previous company. Her values, her integrity, her ethics are extraordinary. And another guy called Ian Roberts and another lady called Maddow, when there are people in an organization that you really respect and respect their core values and their integrity, it gives you a good feeling that this company is a great company to go and work for because I trust those individuals. They are extraordinary, and they would have worked for something. So that has been true. I joined and they maintain the highest set of core values, the highest integrity, and they're great people to work with and for. So yeah, values are something very important to me personally. And I've literally, the reason the cards are on my desk is I took a young woman through this exercise last week. And we're just looking at hers, but she's a lot younger at the start of her career. And it is good to sort of see the ambition and the money and those sorts of things in there. But they will evolve over the years, and it's just a good way to actually learn and help you grow as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:51) Now one of the things I always like to ask people that are farther ahead than I am. So I'm 37. I'm about to enter into my forties. You just wrapped up your forties. What advice or changes should I expect? How would you, like, reduce your forties to like a couple sentences of what you learned?

(Nick Calver at 00:44:11) Of what I learned? Yeah. Number one was probably health. I started to exercise a lot more in my mid-forties. So that's a really important thing, and it stayed a constant now. And I understand more maybe about the benefits of health. The big mistake I made, I was commuting. So I live a hundred miles away from London. I had a good job in London, and my twins were born. And I was getting up at 4 a.m., and I was getting home at 9 p.m. every day, five days a week for about three years. So that was tough. How I did it, I don't know when I look back.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:04) Yeah. A good wife.

(Nick Calver at 00:45:05) A good wife. An amazing wife. Because I'd get home. And the reason I came out, I wanted to be with the kids. I want to see the kids. So the twins would be there. And then you start to stay away a little bit because you're just tired, and then you miss out on the family. And it's that whole balance of, you know, I guess, your core values and coming back to what's important. The family are so important, and if you don't mind me slipping into my fifties a little bit, COVID. This is another personal story. I'm not sure how relevant it is for your audience. But COVID hit. My children were interviewed by the headmaster to go to a private school in the UK. And they were interviewed in this seat, actually. And I was sitting in the corner over there because with safeguarding, you can't let a child talk to an adult or be in a room. So the headmaster asked my son, and he was 11, and they said, "What do you think about COVID?" And he said, "I love it." And then I was, "Sorry. What do you mean?" And he said, "Well, I get super dad." And my daughter said the same thing. And I sat over there, and it just got me. It's just a—so yeah, COVID really helped bring the family back together. I know loads of people suffered and the tragedy in the world. But for me, personally, with my family, it brought me back to the family. And I'd stopped—I was traveling. I was in four or five countries a week at that point. I was always on a plane in a hotel. And I changed after COVID because of that. And I still travel, and I still go around the world and go to America, but I know how important it is to spend time with the kids and the family.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:54) Oh my goodness. That's a good story. So, man, COVID did the same thing for me. Very similar thing. I was—yeah. I was a workaholic, you know, like, just I really enjoyed it. It had worked for me then. And the excuse I made was when we had a kid and I was still doing the workaholic thing, it's like they're not going to remember anything until they're like two or three. So like, I can spend these next two or three years just like crushing it as hard as I can. And then at some point, I'll have to stop. Well, you know, two or three years goes by, and my wife calls me. It's a Saturday. I'm at the office. I was like really doing it. And in the background, I heard grandpa, because my wife was over at her parents' house, grandpa asked my daughter, who was like three or four, he's like, "Is daddy coming over?" I could just hear him in the background while I was on the phone with my wife. And she says to grandpa, she goes, "No, daddy doesn't do things with us."

(Nick Calver at 00:47:48) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:49) So here's what I did, Nick. I said, "Hold on, Michelle. I think we're at that point." And she's like, "Yeah." You know, because our marriage was stressed from it too. Your marriage is obviously stressed from that. Anyways, so we knew our marriage was already stressed. I heard that, and I was like, this is the moment. Like, this is it right now. So I hung the phone up. I went and I bought a camper. And I showed up at grandpa's house, and I said, "We're going camping. Like, I don't work weekends anymore. Daddy doesn't work weekends anymore. Daddy comes home from work at 5 p.m. Daddy has dinner with you." And like, daddy is here. Like, I cannot—it just crushed my heart so much. And that was about five, five, six years ago.

(Nick Calver at 00:48:30) It's interesting though because what I found is then you prioritize more effectively because just because you're not at work a hundred hours a week, you can prioritize effectively. You can get just as much done, but it's a matter of really focusing and really delivering during the time, executing. So if you can segment your day in such a way that you have the time for your family, your time for exercise, time to eat healthily, which is sometimes Cobra, and then the time to get your job done as well. And there's the old weekends where we have to work. I don't mind, but it's rare now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:09) Yeah. It has to be the exception, not the rule. You know?

(Nick Calver at 00:49:12) And the real unfortunate example, Cecil Lloyd Smith, the Chief Security Officer, again, on holiday, I'd pop out for a cycle ride in the morning and I'd disappear up a mountain. Then I'd do an hour's worth of meetings and then I'd come back to the family and cycle and just have the holiday. It was like seven in the morning, so they didn't know. But my wife wondered why I wasn't losing more weight because I was like having for this two-hour bike ride, but I'd only done ten, twenty minutes of cycling. The rest of it was work.

(Nick Calver at 00:49:42) But she did care. She knew that. I think she knew.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:46) It sounds like you have a strong relationship, so that's real good. One last question that I had. One thing that caught my eye particularly about the prep document was when we were talking about evaluating a risky career move. So, Nick, I want your advice on if somebody's out there, they're contemplating a risky career move. How do they evaluate that risk and then gain confidence to do it or not to do it?

(Nick Calver at 00:50:12) It's interesting. So I'll give you the example of probably the biggest risk I took and then come back to how I evaluated it if that's okay. And I've been through a few career changes. I spent twenty years at my first company, and, you know, we learned and worked my way up from the bottom to a good senior position. Moved down to work down in London, worked for one bank for a few years, and moved to another bank.

(Nick Calver at 00:50:39) And at the second bank, I was running this $2 billion cost optimization program. Big program, critical for the bank and sort of share price impacting. And it was tough. It was the long hours. And during that, I was talking to lots of suppliers, like IBM and Oracle and VMware and all these people.

(Nick Calver at 00:51:05) And a number of the vendors said, "Nick, we like the way you interact. You know, it's about that mutually beneficial outcome. It's not about trying to get every last drop of blood out of a supplier or vice versa." So they like that. So they approached me and they said, "We'd like you to come and work for us." And I'd never thought about me working for a vendor. I'd always been this guy in the banks just doing stuff, delivering stuff for customers. And so I was weighing it up. And there's some of the glamorous elements, the international travel, which I wasn't used to and these things. But what I did was went back to the cards and went back to the core values. And I had my five cards, and I measured the impact of that change on my five cards.

(Nick Calver at 00:52:00) So I did the before measure, and I did the after measure. And it was head and shoulders. It was, you need to go—the opportunity, the culture. To give you an idea from a culture perspective, in the banks, they do employee satisfaction surveys. I think they do in every organization, actually. And in the banks, the score was in the twenties. I ended up joining. I'd leaped out of banking, went on the supply side, joined VMware, and they were running satisfaction survey scores of seventies, in the high seventies. And it was actually Liz, the lady who rang me up and asked me to join Palo Alto Networks. She was the lady who told me about that score during the process.

(Nick Calver at 00:52:44) But the probably the risk for me was I had to quit because I wasn't able to talk to any vendors about a job whilst I was running this program because I was negotiating. That wasn't ethical. So I had to discuss with my wife, and I resigned with no job. So you got a family, you got a mortgage, you got kids, private school, that's different. Yeah.

(Nick Calver at 00:53:07) So that was a big personal risk. But I think with the core values and where I saw where I could envision me going and how it actually linked to me personally, it was worth the risk. Everybody needs to measure up against their own personal circumstances and things and what's actually truly at risk. But, yeah, for me, per se, it's about those core values and where I'm going to travel on my journey, ultimately.

(Intro Narrator at 00:53:32) Oh, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:33) That is so good. Now there are—I think we got through about half of our prep for this episode. I'm actually really interested in your thoughts and stuff, but I know we are at time. So an idea that I have is, you know, maybe next month, we could come back on and have the second half of the conversation if you're open to that.

(Nick Calver at 00:53:50) Oh, I'm open to that because it's just a good conversation. And there's lots of personal stuff today. I hope you don't mind that. It's just being authentic. So.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:00) That's what the show—you know, the podcast is us just hanging out and talking. That's what works. So.

(Nick Calver at 00:54:07) Okay. Maybe get a beer next time then. It's a bit early for you, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:14) It's a bit early for me. I'll bring a Pellegrino. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.