TT: Network like a Leader with Marcus East, former Technical Director at Google

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're bringing you an episode of Tech Titans. Marcus East, former technical director of the office of the CTO at Google, joins us in this episode to share his best advice on how to network like a leader. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Tech Titans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) You seem to be really good at networking with people, building relationships. You seem to be really smart about the different associations that you belong to, professional groups, and it just stood out to me. And I was curious, how do you approach that? How did you get involved with some of them originally? Did someone suggest that you do that? Like, where did you get your first experience into being a part of those types of groups?

(Marcus East at 00:00:45) Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you for noticing that. For me, it starts at the beginning of my career. I was very fortunate that 26 years ago when I was starting out after leaving college, I joined IBM. And one of the things that was very important there was that people in IBM and the executives that I worked with in IBM really believed in investing in their people and building a network that would support them.

(Marcus East at 00:01:11) And one of the things that happened very early in my IBM career is that some of the senior execs took me under their wing, and there was a group of about 14 of them who then spent over the next couple of years a lot of time with me teaching me about what it means to be a technologist, what it means to be helping customers with their technology. And why that's important to me is that I understood that having a network of people that you can learn from and a network of people that you can provide value to is critically important as a technologist, and I think that it's one of the things that helps to identify the most impactful CTOs and CIOs versus those who aren't. You need to be able to build relationships with nontechnologists, with other technologists deep into your engineering function. And I think that I was very fortunate to have had that experience early in my career.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:09) Yeah. So if people were wondering about how to get started, you know, maybe somebody's saying, I haven't been a part of these groups, but I've heard of groups, what sort of insight do you have for them? How could they get started?

(Marcus East at 00:02:19) Yeah. Many of these groups have some quite interesting opportunities to engage with them through, they have, for example, open nights where there might be some key speakers coming in, and you can get to see how the group operates. But we all know that personal introductions can be very important as well. And one of the things that I think has been interesting for me is watching how some people at the start of their career are really good at reaching out and asking for advice and building connections and asking to be introduced into those sorts of groups.

(Marcus East at 00:02:55) And I think you've got to, if you're at the start of your career, have the confidence to reach out to people who may be a few years ahead of you and to ask them for support. Just this week, I was contacted by a technologist and architect over in the UK who is super interested in continuing his career. And he said, look, I've seen some really interesting things in your background. Would you be willing to talk to me and tell me about groups and organizations that I can connect with? And I was, of course, happy to do so because it's the sort of thing that helped me in my career early on as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:31) Yeah. I find that when I was in that position, I was shy. When I was newer, I was more shy. But then once I learned how to ask, it became easy because, yeah, 80% of the people say no. But if you ask 100 people, you get 20 people who are willing to help you, 10 that it actually comes down to, and you build three or four meaningful relationships. And it takes a week to kick that off. So learning going through that process and then owning a business and understanding how sales works, you need a lot of at-bats. But going through that process really builds confidence. And also, for me and obviously for you based off of that story, when people who are newer in the game are asking for help, it's really pretty easy to help. And I'm often really open to it if they ask politely, you know. And so I would say for younger people listening, like, don't be shy.

(Marcus East at 00:04:32) Just do it. Couldn't agree more, Joel. And I think one of the other things that's important is it's good to develop a point of view even early in your career. So one of the things that was interesting for me was that back in 1996, I took it upon myself to write a white paper about the impact of the Internet on technology. Now some of the senior execs at IBM said that's not your job, but actually, the paper was pretty well received. And so I then became known as someone who was really interested in what was described at the time as e-business. And much of my career since then has been focused on e-commerce. It's been focused on building large-scale systems. As an example, when I was back in the UK, I was the CIO for one of the largest nonprofits over there called Comic Relief, and it's famous for having these big telethons. And the problem was that back in 2009, 2010, people were increasingly wanting to interact with the charity online rather than through the telephone.

(Marcus East at 00:05:36) And so I worked with my team to build what at the time was one of the most scalable, and one of the first cloud-based architectures that allowed us to handle a huge volume of transactions in a very short period of time. We were doing about 55 transactions a minute in terms of overall technology throughput. And then on a credit card basis, we were doing about 500 transactions per second, which was remarkable. And what was interesting about that for me is that I really didn't think about that as a new thing. We were just looking for a solution to our business problem. But then I was approached by some people from the British Computer Society who said, look, the cloud is something that people are starting to get interested in. We'd love you to come and share some of your thoughts and your thinking with us. And that ultimately led to me becoming a fellow of the British Computer Society. So that was a really interesting experience for me, and I think that people should always try to develop some sort of deep expertise in one area to help move their careers forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:42) Yes. And then share your insights and opinions even though it might not be exactly 100% right. Open that up for discussion so people can at least join the conversation.

(Marcus East at 00:06:55) I couldn't agree more. And just to give you another example, this week I was invited to join a group of senior tech leaders from around the world in a sort of Chatham House rules discussion about challenges that they face. And one of the things that was interesting for me was that I found myself being a little bit contrarian in that conversation in that many people were just talking about how great it is to be a CIO or a CTO. But I made the point that to be really effective, CIOs and CTOs also have to be great partners to the business stakeholders that they work with. And I think the skills that you need to be a CTO to be successful are more than just those technical skills that may have got us started at the beginning of our careers.

(Marcus East at 00:07:42) You've really got to understand how to solve business problems and how to deliver business value. And the pushback in the meeting was that some of the people were saying, look, as a CIO, you're defending your technology from other business executives who don't understand it. And I think for me, that's a slightly old-fashioned approach. And what's interesting in my role in the office of the CTO is I get to work with many forward-thinking tech leaders. And because we're positioned as that trusted advisor, they're very open to talking to us about some of their biggest challenges. And that for me is key because for us to be successful CTOs and tech leaders, we always have to be learning and developing ourselves too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:26) Whenever I hear stories, I'm like, oh, that's right. There are entire groups of people that still have that defensive posture that was popular a decade ago. But that's not how you get farther ahead culturally. If I were looking for a new place to work, if I saw a company start saying, you know, about protecting developers or doing these words or phrases, those are typically red flags for me because I'm like, all right, then they just don't have everyone on the same page in the culture.

(Marcus East at 00:08:56) Yeah. I head for the hills when I hear people saying that. But joking aside, one of the things that's key is that increasingly CIOs and CTOs are talking to us about the help that they need to drive, not the technology transformation that's going to support the business, but the cultural transformation that really underpins that. And it might surprise you to hear that one of the things we do a lot of in the office of the CTO is help organizations with that cultural transformation. To give you a couple of examples, I've done a lot of work with big insurance companies recently both here in the US and over in the UK. And one of the things they're trying to get to grips with is how do they balance the desire to maintain their systems and keep the lights on with the need to also innovate.

(Marcus East at 00:09:34) And for us in the office of the CTO, one of the things that's key is that, yes, the technology is critical in being successful, but you also have to build a culture that embraces principles like innovation, real extreme collaboration, experimentation. And, ultimately, I think the most important thing is a real strong focus on the end customer. And if you have those things, if you build a culture in your tech function that embraces those things, then you can really be successful in delivering business value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:20) I just get nerdy with optimizations, like supply chains. I haven't personally worked in supply chains before, but getting exposure to that and how they optimize within is just, it's super nerdy but also fun.

(Marcus East at 00:10:34) Yeah. And important. And one of the things that I'm really excited about right now is how AI and machine learning can help more traditional organizations change their businesses. So I'd mentioned earlier insurance, and many people think of insurance companies as being very risk-averse, very low when it comes to innovation. But recently, we worked with one of the big insurance brokers in the UK to build their first AI-based syndicate. It's called Kai. And the discussions that we had with the CEO over the last few months have been super interesting because on the one hand, his organization is around 600 years old and has been working in the field for that time, and the Lloyd's of London market that they operate in has been around for 600 years. And so they have incredible respect for the traditions that have allowed them to be successful.

(Marcus East at 00:11:23) But at the same time, as a forward-thinking CEO, he could see that in 50 years' time, the way in which they operated their business couldn't be sustained. And he actually sought a relationship with Google, not because we were an existing provider of technology to them, but because they loved our bias towards innovation. And I remember looking at him in this first meeting that we had, and he said, look, I don't really understand technology. I'm not a technologist, but I do know that Google has leadership in this space. And what I want is not just Google technology. I want Google thinking.

(Marcus East at 00:12:02) I want to know how Google would approach tackling the problems that we're facing. One of the principles that I shared in that meeting was 10X thinking. And in Google, that's the belief that if you're trying to tackle a problem, don't just think about making it 10% better. Think about how you could make it 10 times better, and that requires you to really step away from what you know today to get out of your comfort zone and to think about the technologies that could really shape what you're trying to deliver. And in the case of this insurance company, that led to us helping them build their first AI-based and AI-driven service, which is going to transform the industry. And we really have a strong passion to help drive positive disruption in existing enterprises and existing industries that haven't necessarily embraced technology before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:57) Okay. So let me wrap my mind around this because I'm getting pretty excited here. So this 600-year-old industry leader, you get to meet with them and brainstorm technology products and outside-the-box thinking, and then help take that, deliver that to them, and help them to take that to market. That's something you get to do. You get to be a part of that.

(Marcus East at 00:13:17) Absolutely. I love it. Get to do it. That is one of the primary reasons that the office of the CTO exists. If you were to speak to some of my colleagues, they would say the reason that they wake up in the morning is because they feel empowered to help Google's customers find solutions to their most difficult business problems. And that doesn't mean that they have to use Google technology. The reality is that most of us are pretty open-minded in terms of the technology, but we just have this willingness to help them.

(Marcus East at 00:13:48) And in this particular instance, what I thought was really interesting was that the company that we worked with had previously done lots of big pieces of consultancy work with big consulting firms, and none of those had actually translated into a tangible thing that customers could touch. And our bias in Google is towards action. And so we said, yeah, we can definitely have a conversation about all of the principles, but we want to build something with you. We want to build a proof of concept that shows what this could do and helps to inform the rest of the industry. And that's increasingly, I think, why many enterprise customers who didn't work with Google before are coming to work with Google because they understand that we have a slightly different approach, and they can tap into the years of experience that we have building products like YouTube, like Google Search, like Android that are used by millions of people.

(Marcus East at 00:14:42) And that's incredibly exciting. And the best way for me to describe how I feel about it is probably what my wife says. My wife often says to me, the problem I have with your job is that you would do it for free. You would absolutely do your job for free. And I just keep saying to her, please don't tell my boss.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:01) Dude, that's amazing though, because I get what you're saying. I get to talk to you for my job. I am so excited that I get to do this. And I had to do it for free for a long time. I think we all do starting out. But yeah, I think that, you know, we hear that sentence about, okay, we help Google's top customers find their, you know, that's a polished sentence and I get that, and that wouldn't ever raise an eyebrow to me having read it. But hearing a story about how you get to do this with this older company and that just creates such a different mental image. It gets, it makes it so much more exciting. It also kind of is helping me understand about this concept of the office of the CTO, because now you have a group of these CTOs. So when someone comes into the office, they can get a specific area of expertise. Is that the thinking?

(Marcus East at 00:15:56) Yeah. So we're an interesting collection of different skill sets and experiences. Some of us are super technical and have been software engineers for, you know, 25 or 30 years. Some, like me, have come from more of a consulting background and have really spent a lot of time thinking about the business implications of technology. And the beauty of the team is that we get together on a regular basis, and using the tools that Google has made available, we can collaborate together even though we're in different parts of the world.

(Marcus East at 00:16:27) And so if I, for example, have a business problem that a customer has discussed with me, and if I don't feel that I have the right level of expertise in that particular field, I can just bring it back to the team, and we will, what we call, swarm on it together in order to make sure that we come up with a really compelling proposition, which will then help our customers to move their business forward. So the swarming of the team and the way in which we come together to collaborate with each other is as important as the collaboration that we do with our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:00) Is that a methodology that's common out there, this concept of the team swarming, like how to execute on it?

(Marcus East at 00:17:08) Yeah. I think it's something that is gaining traction. Many of the customers that we work with are asking us more about that. And just to give you a couple of principles that I think are really important there, in Google, the company tends to be fairly open by default. And what I mean by that is if you are working on something, as long as it is not confidential and protected by an NDA, there is an expectation that you will openly discuss it with other people and share your learning and your thinking with them even if they're in a different team.

(Marcus East at 00:17:41) So one of the things that was most interesting for me when I joined Google was that people in different parts of the company who had nothing to do with me would often reach out and say, I've heard you're working on project X. Sounds interesting to me. I'd like to learn about it. Can we put half an hour in the calendar? And that openness, I think, leads to some really great outcomes.

(Marcus East at 00:18:05) And some of the meetings that I've been in, just having the perspective of someone who has been thinking about a completely different field of technology for a few years is really powerful. The other thing that's important for us is that the tools that we use allow us to easily collaborate together on documents. And one of the things you might have seen is I've done a few articles for the Forbes Brand Voice portal, talking about the cloud primarily. And the first example of that that I did, I had about 42 other people in Google who all came into that document to make contributions, to make comments, to make edits because they're so passionate about the topic and also because in Google, we want to help each other. And tools like G Suite really help us to do that.

(Marcus East at 00:18:55) And yeah, ability to operate on a Google Doc completely enables that swarming mentality.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:02) Okay. So I am a huge fan of G Suite. We use it every single day at the business. Your show notes, everything that's in front of me right now is a G Suite, or a Google Doc. I mean, this has just become the word now. Like, it's just the Google Doc. It's the spreadsheets with my accountants and my finances and all of that. Like, it doesn't even compare to anything. I don't know. I'm just like a native on the Google Docs, and I'm a huge fan.

(Marcus East at 00:19:32) That's good to hear. I think that I've always been told because I have worked in a world where there were mainframes and there were very old school applications. And I absolutely love the freedom and the flexibility that tools like G Suite gives. But I also appreciate that you've got to make some cultural change to really embrace them. In that, if your culture in an organization is closed, you probably are not going to want to embrace a tool that provides that sort of open collaboration.

(Marcus East at 00:20:05) And that for me is another good example of where the technology and the cultural change sort of go hand in hand. To get the best out of using a tool like G Suite, you have to be prepared to adapt your processes and your culture. I'll throw out one customer example that I think is a really good one, and that would be PwC, the global consulting firm. They have around 275,000 people who are now using G Suite. And in fact, we just released a video about that, and it has completely transformed the way that they work.

(Marcus East at 00:20:36) And I'll share one data point with you that I think is interesting. Prior to them using G Suite, most of their customer interactions were done in a sort of formal structured way where somebody would send a calendar invite, someone would then turn up, and they would sort of work together on that. Since they've adopted G Suite, the majority of their interactions with customers are now ad hoc, where they say, hey, let's just jump on Meet, and let's talk about this right now. And as you can imagine during the pandemic, it's been critical to them because they've been able to continue interacting with their customers, running their businesses.

(Marcus East at 00:21:13) So for them, yes, the technology solution that we've provided was very critical to success, but actually, their willingness to change and to adapt their culture was the key driver.