CIO of HPE - Leading a Massive Enterprise

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, we're talking to Rashmi, the CIO at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And we discuss the different challenges presented by leading teams versus leading teams of teams, why it's important for technologists to be business outcome focused, and how Rashmi trains her leaders to go far rather than go fast. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:33) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Rashmi at 00:00:44) Started in the software field with mainframe technologies and had my journey through architecture and engineer roles, which I preferred over program management and client service roles. So grew in the architecture space eventually. From there, I was picked up by one of my CIOs to take a business unit CIO role based on my ability to execute as well as see and create the vision and bring the teams together to think about future versus what we were doing yesterday and today. When I took the business unit CIO role for the first time almost six years ago, I found it interesting. What I found most interesting about it is that it's not only about the engineering and the technology that we spend time on, but how much of the people leadership and business outcome driven approach is needed for today's CIOs to be able to propel that entire company into a whole new direction with the use of technology. And I find that most exciting as part of this role.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:09) So what sort of exciting business outcomes are you working on now?

(Rashmi at 00:02:13) Yes. So currently, I have a team of close to almost a thousand people, which not only supports 82,000 end users across our 200-plus global sites, but we are also running the entire technology operations end to end for the company, including infrastructure, network, cyber, end user, and unified collaboration. We are also responsible for the enterprise-wide application tools and vendor landscape that run the business, from business and its sales to supply chain to services. And the need for technology is just growing day by day. We work on large programs to deliver multi-year product development abilities to change how the company works. But during that process, the need for technology also changes or actually elevates. And while doing that to run the company, we are also delivering a fully integrated ecosystem of automation, digitalization, and data analytics to enable Hewlett Packard Enterprise's digital transformation to drive towards being more of a digital product company. Yes, we are a tech company, but we were selling more non-digital products to digitalize our customers. But now we are ourselves disrupting ourselves and offering every product which is digital or as a service. And that's where I can talk more about our GreenLake platform, which is more from HPE's perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:59) Okay. You said it's Greenlight or Greenlit?

(Rashmi at 00:04:02) It's GreenLake. GreenLake. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:05) Okay. Got it. GreenLake. You've got all the different lakes. I love it. I love it. That's original. I like GreenLake, putting the color in front. I like that.

(Rashmi at 00:04:15) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:15) I'm curious, though, about you as a person. Before we get into that, like, who—how would you describe yourself or how would your classmates describe you when you were in high school?

(Rashmi at 00:04:31) That's a very interesting question. So I was always a hustler. You talk about my classmates and myself, I never thought that I was like this super bright, propeller head, intelligent girl. I always thought of myself as somebody who can hustle and learn anything. And my friends saw me as a really hardworking person who was trying to kind of get herself to always that next level of the success that I already had.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:07) Are your parents like that as well?

(Rashmi at 00:05:09) Yeah. So my parents are very interesting. My mother, since I remember her, she was very particular about me going into a STEM field and being either a doctor or an engineer. So she was always about math and science. You are a good girl. If you put your heart and mind to it, you will be able to do it. So just do it type thing. She always pushed me towards education. And I actually became—I come from a very educated family of PhDs and whatnot, but I was the first into engineering, the first engineering girl in the family.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:53) Very cool. Now as your career started to progress, did you get into any of the self-help or motivation type content that's out there to help you get to that next level, or is it just completely internal for you?

(Rashmi at 00:06:07) Yeah. I just came off of a session with our women's network where I was talking about the power of no, and this question came up too. I got married when I was in my senior year of college and I got my twin boys couple of years into it. And for both my husband and I, they were really important. He was a high achieving entrepreneur. I was an engineer. He's my biggest sponsor. And his thing was, I don't want you quitting working because we have children now. We will both share the responsibility, and we'll both have a career. So he actually took a little bit of a step back so that he could help me balance the career and motherhood as well. So I've never gone to get a coach or a self-help kind of person, which he still thinks I should. But we have been there, I would say, for each other, and we have set our priorities and gone and achieved it together. Let's put it this way. So when you always feel that you have somebody next to you who is as vested in you, which was my mother before and then my husband and his family, to get to see you grow and progress in your career. It was a huge kind of support system and the freedom that it provided me to be able to make sure that there is nothing out there which is not possible for me to get.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:52) I love it. They're giving me goosebumps over here. Your twin boys. What type of technology—they're probably not boys anymore, but what type of technology are they into?

(Rashmi at 00:08:00) They're both data scientists. One works for one of the large banks, and the other one is at a large pharmaceutical company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:10) That is so cool. Are you proud of them?

(Rashmi at 00:08:13) I'm very proud of them. And it's interesting how, you know, they also see two of us as completing their circle of support system. Right? So if they want to know anything about the career, and as they talk to their managers or more senior folks in the organization, they come and share with me the interaction, how they behave, what they said. Sometimes they talk about bad, gnarly problems that they're trying to solve from a technology perspective. But if they need some help with their finances or investments or, you know, what should I do with this type of money, then they go to their dad. So it's like they have figured out what their parents are good at and who they can tap when they need to get some advice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:05) Yeah. We've got small children. I have a four-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son, and they've quickly figured out, even at that age, who is the one they need to go to for what things that they want.

(Rashmi at 00:09:17) Yep. Absolutely. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:21) So help me understand the difference between HP and HPE.

(Rashmi at 00:09:27) Yeah. So you know HP, original HP, was the founder of Silicon Valley. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard came out of Stanford and founded the first tech company of Silicon Valley. It has gone through enormous amounts of growth, multiple acquisitions from DEC to Tandem to eventually Compaq and SGI and EDS through different CEO events over the last twenty years, I would say. When Meg Whitman decided to split the company based on consumer and enterprise, and that's how HP, which we also call HP Inc or HPQ as per their stock ticker—and then HP Enterprise was split almost five years ago. And then HP Enterprise had all the data center solutions from storage, compute, our acquisition of Aruba for networking, as well as it had a huge set of software portfolio and services portfolio called HPES. Those were spun off again from HP Enterprise. The HPES combined with CSC and became a multibillion-dollar company, DXC, and HP software combined with Micro Focus for all the testing tools, data center tools. And we, HPE, are the entire data center product and services including network. And HPI is all the consumer products around desktops and laptops, as well as printing solutions for enterprises. So hope I'm able to clarify it for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:34) Yeah. Did you say DXC? Like, one of the spin-offs became DXC?

(Rashmi at 00:11:39) Yeah. Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:40) Oh, I know them. Yeah.

(Rashmi at 00:11:42) Yeah. It's close to a $25 billion company. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:47) I know a couple of their employees. They're actually pretty good friends of mine. Met them at like one of the tech meetups in Tampa, Florida. And they were running projects. And I think they did like a zero bench type, or at least their division was like a zero bench, like custom software development section that they were working on.

(Rashmi at 00:12:09) We still work with DXC for a lot of the, I would say, technical programs that they are doing for us. So we are very close partners at this point. So yes, very interesting to hear that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:21) Yeah. Small world. That's really cool. I want to know, what is your average day like as a CIO?

(Rashmi at 00:12:26) I would say it's equally divided. I try to spend a lot of time on people. So having that structure and the setup where I work with my direct team members, which I call CIO staff, find opportunities to work with my extended leadership team—so my direct team is around 11, extended leadership is almost 40 people. And then I have different touchpoints with my teams at skip levels, one-on-ones, doing ask-me-anythings through Slack and whatnot. So I'm very obsessive-compulsive about keeping in touch with my people, making our leaders successful in leading this larger organization because I cannot alone lead it. Right? The other part of the day is also very focused on our business leaders, which is our internal customers. We are driving a lot of transformation, and that takes a lot of alignment across other business. And that's the interesting part about IT, that we connect the dots across the organization. If you look at individual organizations like sales or customer service or technology services or finance or different product BUs, they're all optimized to be successful in their silos. It's shared services organizations like IT and others who bring them together to say, how do you do things for our company in a uniform way to give better customer experience? And then I would say other part of my time goes into a lot of operational issues because I'm very—I think you can bring innovation into anything, into new product development as well as running the day to day, because we, as CIO, have to optimize our run so that we can take resources out of there and put those in future innovation. And the last but not the least is the future innovation, technological stuff. And I'm a CIO. I'm a leader now, but I'm still a technologist like you. As you said, you're an engineer, and I like to get involved into some of the—I wouldn't say details and the nitty gritty, but at the highest level, how to bring our technology together to be able to drive better business outcomes. So the day will be distributed in those four areas primarily.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:02) I love it. No, you sound like you got some similarities to me. I never thought that I would be doing this podcast, but when I was an engineer, primarily I just worked on different projects. I would work on a project for two or three years. I just had a small consultancy. And so I'd do a project and then do financial services and then health and fitness, and I would get to learn all of these different industries. But, you know, and that's what keeps it real exciting for me. And then now I get to talk to people about different things all day. It's like that on steroids, but with a company as large as HPE, you get to do that all day.

(Rashmi at 00:15:38) And there is so much to learn. Right? Because business processes built over the decades and years, and how do you change that mindset to say now you have to make it technologically enabled?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:52) I'm curious about the patterns that you're seeing. So you get to mentor all of these great people. Obviously, you've got great leaders. You've got the resources to have great leaders. You can coach them. You can get coaches for them, all of this stuff. What are the patterns that you see as you're coaching the next generation of leaders?

(Rashmi at 00:16:13) So in the next generation of leaders, what I'm seeing is there is enormous amount of passion for understanding the technology aspects of things, which is the engineering. Right? And having that geek speak going on. I'm not saying it's generalized 100%, but the kind of people I interact with, either in our product divisions or within our IT divisions—when you ask them about the issue that happened, which created a bad customer experience, most of the time, explanation is pretty complicated in terms of technology. I can understand it. My point is, how do we not only think about what happened in the technology today, but how do I apply technology to make sure it does not happen or creates better customer experience going forward? So the point I'm trying to make is technologists are very technology-out focused versus we need to bring an outside-in focus. It's starting from the business outcome, the customer experience that we want to drive, and how do we apply technology to drive that outcome. The challenge is when you go through engineering school, there is so much focus on the engineering aspect of it, and I came from there, honestly. It took me a while to kind of change my mindset to not be, "I have the solution. Where is the problem?" Right? To really understanding the problem, not appreciating the problem, understanding the problem, and finding a solution for it. The second piece I would say is, you know, we talk about hyper-automation and automation taking people's jobs, but with COVID and the need for digital acceleration, we are seeing how we don't have the right set of people to deliver this advancement in technology or the hyper-automation at this point. And I feel that along with engineering skills, we need the people skills for us to have leaders who can drive people to a common goal. As you talked about your growing up, managing a team, and then teams of teams, that takes a different type of skill set to motivate team members to be able to drive that better business outcome outside-in, which is possible. So my big part of training my leaders is opening their doors, opening their minds to think in terms of how I bring more people along so that we go far versus going alone and going fast. A lot of us engineers are better at going alone and going fast versus building that sum of the parts is bigger than the whole. Right? So bringing those parts together and taking us further out into advancement.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:17) Yeah. Yeah. I found that when you talked about it's a different skill set from managing teams to teams of teams, that was a really rough transition for me to learn that. But I'm curious, as you learned that, what were some of your takeaways on the differences between managing teams or the people, teams of teams?

(Rashmi at 00:19:39) Yeah. The way I have driven, and you know, there are many different ways to do it. There are many successful leaders who are driving a lot of

(Rashmi at 00:19:48) successful transitions. But the way I have seen it, having that North Star, like where we need to be ultimately, is very important. And then from there, if I know the end state, how do I break the steps that I need to take to get there? Because, you know, these days, our problems are no more two-dimensional, not even three-dimensional. I talk about orthogonal problems.

(Rashmi at 00:20:18) Right? Because you define a destination, you define those sets of pieces that could take you there. But by the time you are taking those together and driving to that destination, your variables change along the way. Sometimes those variables are talent, sometimes the technology availability or its performance, or it's the business needs an outcome which is changing extremely fast. But how do you keep creating prioritization and keep driving your team towards that North Star through some lofty goals and some achievable goals?

(Rashmi at 00:20:56) If we make it very easy and achievable, our team will not be happy to do it. They want to see that they're stretching themselves into something much bigger. The other piece I would say is purpose plays a big role. When our team members look at that bigger mother ship, bigger company, and what purpose the company wants to drive towards, and does it meet them where they want to be, then I see better results from teams of teams into getting to that North Star position that we have defined for them. I hope I didn't make it too complex.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:36) No, I'm taking notes over here. Sounded awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:40) I'm curious. One of the things that I have found as far as respecting myself is to constantly raise the bar, right? Because no one's going to come up to me and raise the bar. I'm typically pretty independent and I've always owned my own business, things like that. So I rely on myself to take it to the next level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:00) And what I found is when I do that around people and when my team sees me doing those difficult things, I found it was an interesting way that develops respect with them sometimes. Right? They'll say like, oh, look, Joel's doing very difficult things. And they'll sometimes admire that. And so I'm curious, what attributes or what habits do you have that help build respect with your team?

(Rashmi at 00:22:26) Yeah. One thing is, you know, modeling the behaviors that we want in our team. You have to walk the talk and not only say some things and not do it. If I talk about accountability and ownership in my team, being obsessed over the timeline and making sure we give results, I need to do the same myself. And the way I tell them is my role is to remove roadblocks.

(Rashmi at 00:22:57) So no news is bad news to me. Bring me all news so that I can remove those roadblocks so that you can succeed. And again, modeling that behavior that if somebody raises an issue ahead of time, not to say, oh, you're not able to take care of this, but say, great. What are your resolutions? The next thing I ask is, I want risk, I want to get risk, but I want ideas for mitigation.

(Rashmi at 00:23:23) I want to know the issues, but I want to know what are your approaches to resolution so that we can get there. I think that piece for the leader is, one, to kind of keep your ear to the ground, really understand what's going on, what your people are facing, and then removing the roadblocks for their success through your either position or dollars or your knowledge or connecting the dots across organization, is really important for your team members to trust you as a leader and think that you are there with them to get to point B from point A together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:03) I love it. I love it. There's a lot of leaders or people that want to be leaders that listen to the show. So let's focus on, let's say you've got the developer who's maybe a first time CTO, maybe just has a team of five or something of that nature. And then we also, in a similar class, we have somebody who's maybe running a team in a larger organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:26) They would have similar responsibilities to some degree. For a person at that level in their career that wants to take the next step, what sort of thoughts do you have for them?

(Rashmi at 00:24:38) Yeah. So in a smaller set of CTO with five people will have much different mindset than a similar level person within a much larger organization. I would say the person in the much larger organization definitely has a lot to learn from the CTO, because in larger organization, we want to do things the way we did it yesterday or today, tomorrow. And that's what is not propelling forward the incumbent companies as I call them today. Right?

(Rashmi at 00:25:11) So for them to really see how many features, for example, AWS launches in a week. Right? How they kind of do that 10x growth and development within that very complex architectures of their company. Or if you look at Apple, which launches a beta and we as customer test it while they improve it to the next version. Right?

(Rashmi at 00:25:34) And how we get out of that mindset of low risk, always delivering a perfect solution, which gets us behind with our competition. I would say for the CTO in a smaller set of the five people, for them, really, the product they're working for, they need to think from customer end perspective a little bit more than the technology that they're thinking has the answer to create a new set of customer needs and wants. So they need to look at both aspects from inside out and outside in to be able to come up with a solution which has value going forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:11) You're crushing it. When is the book coming out? Are you writing a book?

(Rashmi at 00:26:15) My job does not leave me any time to do things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:22) I love it. I love it. Well, then you can just keep coming on podcasts and sharing your awesome insight. I saw that HPE actually has a podcast. Have you gotten to go on that podcast yet?

(Rashmi at 00:26:32) I have published articles on HPE Next. We do tech talks, and it might be a good idea when I complete a couple of my large transformations to package it up and share with our customers because I'm customer zero for HPE. I run my entire infrastructure on HPE. We call it HOS, HPE on HPE. And there's a lot I can share with the customers around how my team has made it work for ourselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:04) I love it. I love it. We'll put something at the end of the show for people to figure out how they can go listen to the HPE podcast because I'm pretty excited. I personally have not gotten to listen to it yet, but my producer said, oh, it's pretty great. And so I'm excited.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:19) It's on my list. Here, I don't want to forget because we've got about maybe ten minutes left. I want to respect your hard stop. What is the HPE GreenLake platform?

(Rashmi at 00:27:32) Yeah. So HPE GreenLake, when I joined the company, I was pretty impressed with the product. It brings the cloud experience to apps and data everywhere. It enables companies to adopt transformative technology faster and simplify their operations. So public cloud is an amazing invention by AWS and then what Microsoft has done with Azure as well as Google Cloud.

(Rashmi at 00:28:03) But the way we see it, that with the advent of technology and digitalization, all the data is not possible to ship it to public cloud and bring it back to the edge. Most of the data is created at the edge. If you think about retail, which has gone from the front of the store back into a warehouse, the amount of digitalization it needs from inventory to pick, pack, ship and whatnot. If you look at the healthcare setup, the amount of data that we gather at the point of care from the patient, if you think about the oil rig out in the ocean, if you think about a connected car, not even talking automated, fully automated car, but just connected cars. And the amount of data we are generating at the edge. HPE GreenLake delivers infrastructure as a service for all kinds of workloads.

(Rashmi at 00:29:01) We can do it on-premise, fully managed, in a pay-per-use model at the edge, in colos, as well as in those companies' data centers. So that our customers don't have to worry about running an infrastructure. We can do it on their behalf. Our HPE GreenLake Central, our new innovative software platform, IT teams can now rapidly deploy services, gain cost and compliance insight, and simplify management across entire hybrid state of edge, private and public cloud. This frees up our customers' people time and developers from traditional wait time with self-service software platform for the services that they need for all their business need.

(Rashmi at 00:29:55) So in a nutshell, HPE GreenLake brings the modern cloud experience to our customers anywhere they need it and managed as a service by HPE.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:08) That's pretty cool. So wait. So this is going to be like an alternative to AWS?

(Rashmi at 00:30:13) For the right type of workload. Because if you think about if you're in an oil rig, right, or if you are a large solar panel or windmill operator, you don't have time to gather that data at the point where it's generated and take entire data, send it to cloud, and get it back and make decisions in that process. Same is true for connected cars. Right? Same is, we put our some of our computers in space shuttle and work with Microsoft and Azure to provide their processing of the data after the fact.

(Rashmi at 00:30:48) But at the time of the capture, we provide a lot of intelligence to get some answers and only ship data out to the public cloud that we need for that analytics that's needed. But all the operations decision-making is happening at the edge at the point of data generation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:06) That's pretty smart for your team to go focus in that area, right? Because it allows you to stand out and it's very clear that there's obviously a suite of tools. If you specialize in taking things from the edge to the cloud that would save people a bunch of time. I like it.

(Rashmi at 00:31:21) Thank you. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:23) Yes. So, anything else that we didn't get out there to the world that we want to get out there?

(Rashmi at 00:31:30) Yeah. I mean, look, I've been here three years now, and this is the planet's oldest technology company. So we are going through our own mindset transition. So the questions that you asked about leadership were very, very important for us. And now we are driving towards not just being good enough.

(Rashmi at 00:31:52) We want to constantly look ahead and satisfy our customer needs beyond what they see it today. We are accelerating what next. We believe in bold moves, kind of creating that culture of, yes, we can, while also being forced for good. Antonio, our CEO, believes very strongly, very deeply that each one of us can make a difference for others, for our company, and our planet. And that's why we get very involved to help our employees where they need help.

(Rashmi at 00:32:32) And a recent example was helping get their family out of Afghanistan during the recent unrest. Even we did a patent pledge on Earth Day where we had other companies like Microsoft and Facebook join us for making our IP available to make our planet better. You know, we are not, we also make products which needs power, which impacts Earth. But how do we make these products? And GreenLake is a great example, and that's why we call it GreenLake because it reduces consumption of hardware and does it in a very power efficient way. So when we think about us today as a company or me as an individual, I'm able to relate these very, very well from purpose perspective that I talked to you about that today's employee want to connect with their companies, not only for the work they do, but the bigger purpose that they serve of being here today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:35) Yeah. One of my favorite things when researching the company was the modern slavery transparency statement. It's definitely an eye catcher on a page of research. I was like, what is the modern slavery statement? And it was so interesting how much resources you put behind understanding your supply chain and ensuring that those workers are treated fairly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:58) And I thought that was like, I read it. It was like a 14-page document, by the way. But I read your 2021 report. Yeah. And I just, I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:07) I thought it was pretty cool.

(Rashmi at 00:34:08) Awesome. Really appreciate you taking the time to read that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:13) It was super interesting. I was like, how could we, you know, because I think about that type of stuff too. Because you'll be going about life and you'll get a random news article about, you know, issues in other countries with workers that are manufacturing products that we use on a daily basis. And it causes you to take a step back and you're like, is that really happening? Is that hype from the media?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:35) And then, you know, it's easy to turn the other way and not look at it. And so I like that you guys put resources behind not turning away and instead turning in and saying, we need to make sure this isn't happening in our supply chains. And I think that's something to respect there.

(Rashmi at 00:34:50) Thank you. Appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:53) 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].

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:12) Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.