When blueprints start to smolder, true leaders draft new ones on the fly. In this episode, former architect turned Wawa CIO & SVP John Collier reveals how his background in design thinking has helped him make split-second judgments when even the most unforeseeable crises hit. From war-room gut-checks made in the dark to culture-defining decisions that outlast the chaos, John shares hard-won tactics for IT leaders who want a real seat at the table — and who want to be ready when all eyes turn to them.
IT Horror Stories
The scariest stories in IT.
About This Episode
Host
Jonathan Crowe
Director of Community, NinjaOne
Guest
John Collier
SVP and CIO at Wawa
About John Collier
John Collier is the SVP and CIO at Wawa, Inc., a chain of more than 1,000 convenience stores located in 8 states across the eastern US and the District of Columbia. John came to Wawa in October 2017 as the VP and CIO, to lead Wawa’s information technology team. At Wawa, John is responsible for establishing the overall strategic direction for the company’s expanding technology and business services. Prior to joining Wawa, John worked as CIO for TracFone Wireless, Inc. And before TracFone, John spent 5 years with Walmart Stores, Inc. in positions as Global Chief Architect and Intellectual Property Management and Monetization.
Audio Transcript
[00:00:00] John Collier: But I had to start looking at the data, listening to them and start to decide, you know, what do we do? Because we were starting to see the transactions fall off and there was this call to action of making sure we protect the customer.
Introduction
[00:00:14] Jonathan Crowe: Hello, and welcome. Please come in. Join me. I’m Jonathan Crowe, Director of Community at NinjaOne and this, this is IT Horror Stories. Brought to you by NinjaOne, the leader in automated endpoint management.
[00:00:31] Jonathan: Welcome, everyone, to another IT Horror Stories. I’m your host, Jonathan Crowe, director of community at NinjaOne, and for today’s episode, I’m very excited to have John Collier. He’s the CIO and SVP at Philadelphia and Pennsylvania’s pride, Wawa. John, thanks so much for taking time and coming on the show.
[00:00:49] John: Absolutely, Jonathan. Nice to be here and look forward to having the conversation.
[00:00:52] Jonathan: So, John, I understand that prior to being your, your role now, the CIO and SVP at Wawa, that you actually had your first CIO role at a fairly young age. Can you give us a little bit of a background in terms of how you got there and how you got to where you are today?
Architect by design
[00:01:09] John: Yeah, so I think maybe starting out, just to give you a little bit of background on me, is I did not go to school for computer science. I actually went to school for building architecture. So, if you look at my red thread throughout my career, it’s all been around design and, and problem solving. So, earlier in my career I worked for a large engineering company.
[00:01:27] 26 offices, about 2. 3 billion dollars. And I had the opportunity to become CIO, or what they termed at that point as Principal of Technology and Partner, at age of 27. So, I got a really good opportunity to step into a leadership role about four years out of college and got a chance to lead a great organization and help build that organization into more of a technology company that served the construction and design industry.
[00:01:55] So it was a lot of fun. It taught me a lot because I got to do a lot of hands on, which I think served me well to really get a base understanding of technology. I would also add that I did this in Silicon Valley. So when Silicon Valley was growing up, I was there with David Packard and that team, working with HP and others to help design buildings for them.
[00:02:17] So, it gave me a chance to really see the dot com or the technology industry really boom in California. So I got a chance to grow through that, not only in my role, but also the friends and individuals that I had relationships with outside of work.
[00:02:33] Jonathan: And so I imagine too, at that type of company, you mentioned getting more hands on experience. So, now that you’ve had some other CIO positions, would you describe that as a different set where it was your scope a little bit wider than it is now?
[00:02:49] John: At that time it was probably more narrow, but it gave me a chance to do things that you normally wouldn’t do. As far as running cable systems, who as a CIO actually gets her hands dirty and is stringing cables through the office. Who actually is looking at RAID drives and helping set up, set up parity drives.
[00:03:09] So it gave me a chance to really see how the support organization did their jobs and to really live it through their eyes. But also take that, understand the skills of each of them, and then figure out how to maybe lead them and help guide them in a different way than maybe what they’ve seen before.
[00:03:26] Jonathan: And you mentioned having that design background too. And that being a key in how you approach these positions. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
[00:03:33] John: Most things we do in technology, do require some kind of forethought of what you’re building. As a building architect, you know, you have a client that comes to you and says that they want a certain type of house, and you ask a lot of why questions. And that’s really no different than in corporate America, where you have business partners that are trying to accomplish something, whether it be through increased revenue or customer count, and it gives you a chance to really problem solve with them, to really understand and extract out of them what they’re trying to accomplish.
[00:03:56] And then translate that to your engineering and architectural organization to start designing that solution. So I think it really has served me well to really be on the design side and then be able to translate that back in such a way that not only can I communicate to the business, but also I can communicate technically to the technology team.
[00:04:15] And I think sometimes that translation is lost with technical folks.
[00:04:20] Jonathan: Absolutely. Would you say you kind of approach it too in the mindset of, you know, technology in and of itself is just a tool. It’s an end, it’s what we utilize to meet a higher goal. Is that right?
[00:04:32] John: Yeah, absolutely. I think technology is just a kit of parts. No different than building a building, right? You have storage, right? You have networks, you have different components, different applications, and many times it’s how you orchestrate those to meet the business need that’s most important. So it tends to be, you know, I refer to it as the Legos. You’re designing with a set of Legos. You have all these pieces you put together in many, many different ways. But it’s the same basic parts. It’s just how you put them together and orchestrate the data flows throughout that, that really gives you a solution. So I find it very intriguing and really have enjoyed my career in watching some of the really good engineers and architects design that future technology.
When the Lego table starts to shake
[00:05:11] Jonathan: So let’s talk about when that Lego table starts to shake, and you’re now under pressure to react quickly. And you mentioned being put into a leadership level at a fairly young age. You’re now in charge of leading groups of people who in some cases have been in their careers longer than you.
[00:05:30] I understand that the first story that you wanted to talk about is hitting at that time in your career. You had just joined the company that you’re gonna be talking about. And so, not only were you coming in as a relatively young CIO, you also were new to this company.
[00:05:47] John: Yes. So again, I was a young CIO in a non… I would say in a private company. And this just happened to be my first public company I went into, and the company was Williams Sonoma. Great company, great products. I’m advertising for them right now. But you know, and I came in, and two weeks after I started, I had the store support operations team really to make sure that the stores are operational, make sure they’re meeting the customer needs, and really taking care, and making sure we can do transactions, on a daily basis. So, two weeks into my time there, and this probably impacted a lot of folks, but 9/11 occurred. Two weeks into it. September 11th, 2001.
[00:06:27] Those of us who lived through it, it really kind of changed our perspective in many ways, and in my perspective as a new technologist working for my first public company. That morning was very eye opening, not only was eye opening to see what’s happening on the video.
[00:06:42] I’m at home, you can see, you can see something happen around 5:45 in the morning. I get into the office because my pager and things are going off. I go walk into the office and we had multiple screens, typically those screens are watching and monitoring stores.
[00:06:55] In this case, a few of those screens were actually watching the news, and watching the planes hit, and watching the buildings collapse. But at the same time, we had our other metrics up that looks at transaction rates. It looks at, you know, issues that are happening within the stores. Are the networks working properly?
[00:07:11] So you had that, those two sort of views. And what started happening is we had to make some decisions. Because we did not know, like most folks that were experiencing this, we didn’t know where this was going to, where it was going to go. There were threats on, in San Francisco, which is where I was working, there were threats on the Bank of America Tower.
[00:07:29] And so we had to start making some decisions, of do we shut down stores? And at that time, I think we had four, four hundred, five hundred stores. And me being the new leader of this area, I had to start making some decisions without even knowing my team’s name, many of them. But I had to start looking at the data, listening to them and start to decide, you know, what do we do?
[00:07:50] Because we were starting to see the transactions fall off and there was this call to action of making sure we protect the customer. There was that customer mindset. From the first moment of saying, you know, if we stay open, yes, we can make more money, but that if we stay open, we’re also maybe putting our customers at risk because they’re out in public.
[00:08:07] So we made the decision, I made the decision, to start shutting down some of those stores, but I had to do it with a sense of urgency and I had to do it with a team that didn’t know me, but they had to trust my decisions and they had to trust what they are also telling me. So it was a very collaborative approach.
[00:08:24] But again, it started with that customer mindset and that balance between system availability and customer interaction. What I realized, brand new to this company, is the level of complexity of our system. So shutting down the store wasn’t as easy as flipping a switch.
[00:08:39] You had to systematically shut things down in a fashion that you could save the transactions, make sure things came up properly after you recovered, but I would tell you the communication was key. The triage that we had to work ourselves through was key and, I would tell you more importantly, the leadership in a crisis management situation was probably the thing that really got into my mindset and it really changed the way I think about things moving forward. Whether that be a consumer breach as many of you or some of the viewers may be may have experience. But crisis management and being a leader in crisis mode earlier in my career, really, it made me realize that even though I may be stressed, although I may be not knowing what decisions to make based on the data I had, it was still being seen as me making that decision with my partnership with my team.
[00:09:30] And it really has served me well through my career, whatever other crisis I may have faced.
[00:09:36] Jonathan: In that moment when a lot of the eyes in the room turned to you and you realized that you need to start stepping into that role and leading, what were some of the things that you think helped you respond in that moment?
[00:09:50] John: Having been in the decision making role very young and then coming to this, I mean, they’re just different decisions. This was a single decision that took a lot of effort to take, to execute it. So it was harder to make that single decision of shutting down the stores, but there was a long tail to actually executing on that and rolling one store at a time offline and going from east to west coast because that’s that’s the way we took him down.
[00:10:17] I would also say that you know you had to really watch people’s demeanor. There were stresses in the room. There were people that wanted to get home to their own families. No different than working out of Miami and working through hurricanes. You have people that are, that have family on one side or trying to take care of a company on the other side, but that you had to maintain focus or you’re going to hurt the company, and individuals because the results of what we did, whether it’s in a crisis mode or not, it will eventually reflect on them as well. Did we do it right? Did we do it with consistency and good quality? So you have to maintain that focus of your team, although their head’s probably somewhere else at the time as well.
[00:10:55] Jonathan: Understandably so. Had there had to have been some emergency kind of shutdowns or anything like that that would help prepare the team for, okay, at least we have a playbook to follow?
[00:11:04] John: Yeah, there is. I mean, like many companies, I mean, I think it’s very important to have a disaster playbook. Kind of a business continuity and a disaster recovery plan that was brought forward. We knew how to shut it down. The team had, not in this scale, but they knew how to shut down a store.
[00:11:23] It was just more of the scale, and because that’s never happened before. No one, no one shuts down their whole company deliberately, and then really thinking through how to prioritize the stores, was probably one of the bigger decisions of where do we start, how do we start, what are our biggest sales volume stores, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:11:39] So there were things that you had to work through, but yes, there was a playbook. I was unfamiliar with it. So that’s where, again, that relationship with my team came into focus.
[00:11:51] Jonathan: It’s there to be able to be utilized and adapted, but of course, there are going to be some things where it doesn’t apply exactly to each and every possible scenario. You’re going to have to work within that and make, call some audibles or make some other decisions, prioritize. Do you have any recollections of how you were doing that? I mean, you mentioned, okay, what data do we have? It’s going to be limited. We’re not going to be able to have all the data to be able to make a 100 percent confident choice right now of what is the right thing to do, but we have to act.
[00:12:25] And so can you walk through a little bit, just that thought process and how you worked with your team to get as much data as you could to make decisions confidently.
Making decisions confidently in crisis
[00:12:35] John: Yeah, I think, again, we were watching the networks to make sure, again, the time frame is 2001, so a little different network and, you know, than we have today. Part of it was, is do we have connectivity, right? So, there’s things you had to look at to make sure that you could maintain some level of connectivity while you were shutting them down.
[00:12:56] Making sure we execute the actions properly, but then also make sure that the results were what we expected. Did we actually make sure we had the data bushes shut down properly? Did we put it in a position that could go dormant or hybrid for a while, hibernate for a while so we could actually bring it back online without having, you know, databases that were corrupted or something else.
[00:13:16] So there were a lot of things we did, but we had to do it in a very systematic fashion. I don’t remember all the details about how we moved east to west. I just remember it was really stressful, especially being two weeks on the job, but, you know, coming out of it, you know, I would tell you, a week or whatever, after we got done talking about the event, we did kind of reflect on how well we work together.
[00:13:37] And I really thank the team for their leadership, not mine, but their leadership, because they really helped the company through that crisis.
Switching gears
[00:13:45] Jonathan: Thank you for sharing that one. And let’s move on to your next one because in some ways it’s very different. We’re skipping ahead a little bit in terms of timeline in your career. And you’re going to be facing much more of a different crisis here, but you’re finding yourself once again, kind of in one of those war rooms. So let’s get into your second story.
[00:14:06] John: I was an executive leader, Senior Vice President at Countrywide, and subsequently became a Chief Architect at Bank of America. But, to set the scenario. It was 2008. We all remember what 2008 was, it was the financial crisis. It started with the loan industry. And Countrywide was the largest loan processor in the industry.
[00:14:30] And we were processing millions of loans and what it was is you’re actually managing risk. So the portfolios that loans you buy, you’re just buying risk and then you’re allocating and selling that risk off to different companies. So you’re, you’re servicing what they call servicing these loans. We had some inkling that there was going to be some type of collapse.
[00:14:53] I wouldn’t have said that back then, but looking back, that’s the word I would have used. We had some leadership internally that were kind of throwing up red flags. To kind of set the stage so I don’t throw Countrywide completely underneath the bus, there were a lot of government, regulatory and, and really incentives to do exotic loans.
[00:15:10] So, you got to think of the time is these companies were very healthy until you got into this exotic loan selling. And then the amount of decision points that you made whether you know, whether you’re alive, do you have the amount of funds in their thing? Do you have any kids… all these kind of data sets that allowed you to really understand whether that loan was a good loan or not, went away and I think if we went from 14 decision points down to two. And you can imagine when you’re making decisions points of two is are you alive and are you human? Not an animal, although there were some animals that actually had, took out loans at the time.
[00:15:25] There, you really… there was some loans that were taken out by animals because we just didn’t have those points in place. But you went down to two points so you can make loan decisions faster. But that collapse really threw us into a crisis mode and at the time I remember we, it was like more than 70 percent of our loans that we bought on a Thursday.
[00:16:05] On Friday, we did some recalculations and took more time to make, to look at those decision engines, and realized that more than 70 percent of them we should not have purchased. The risk profile was completely off. But when you’re actually competing with Wall Street, these sub second trades on Wall Street and you’re competing with Morgan Stanley’s of the world you have to make a trade based on the information you had.
[00:16:26] So, here we are buying these loans, 70 percent are bad, and we are driving down the entire industry and we were, if we didn’t make better decisions faster, we were going to drive the loan mortgage industry into turmoil, which is what happened. But we were trying to pull it out of the ditch. Friday afternoon, we pulled our entire teams together, engineering teams, etc.
[00:16:48] And we realized we have to build this massive grid compute. So we had everybody in a war room. Trying to understand what it is we could do, how many decision points we need to make, how much compute that would take, how many loans we need to process, within a minute or even a sub second, scenario to really figure out how to pull this thing out of the ditch.
[00:17:06] Now we did not succeed. It still collapsed, but the amount of compute that we threw out at this in a very short amount of time was just amazing. And it was a technical challenge that I had never faced. And again, this is, you know, probably five years after my Williams Sonoma. Seven years after that.
Letting teams do what they do best
[00:17:22] Again, trying to make a different decision, but this was, this was a design decision, not a crisis management decision, although there was crisis in this. But you had architects, business partners, engineers, and I realized the importance of great engineering and how important that was and let the engineers be engineers. And what I learned from that as a leader is, you know, how do you focus on the team? Let them do what they do best. How do you let them do what they do better than you? And I would say a lot of leaders sometimes think they know best, and they don’t. Right? Let the people who do the job, do the job. Your job is to understand what they need and support them. The, in these type of modes, and I would say in leadership in general, we refer to it as servant leadership.
[00:18:04] I think all too often when leaders get in a position and they think they are the leader. It’s not really true. Your teams are the ones that lead. You’re the one that helps clear the way for them. So I think it’s very important to keep that in perspective. I think that’s realized through these crisis events, whether it be the 9/11 event or this, be the crisis of 2008 with financial collapse.
[00:18:25] Let them be the specialists and let them ask you or tell you what you, they need you to clear out of the way for them to let them do their job. So, I think that’s what I’ve realized through my career is you may be at the top of the hierarchy, but your job is to serve.
[00:18:43] Jonathan: So you’re the alpha, but I mean, it’s the pack. The pack is what’s important.
[00:18:46] John: Very much so. Very much so.
[00:18:48] Jonathan: You know, thinking about that scenario, obviously, right, not exactly the same level of, okay, there’s an immediate crisis, the clock is ticking, we need to act fast. But you’re still feeling that pressure, you know, you had seen, okay, there’s a very clear business need.
[00:19:02] And we need to respond to it. And the solution here is revolving around leveraging technology and some very highly skilled people and being able to rally them really quickly. And so, absolutely. The servant leadership makes sense. But you’re also kind of there to, like in the other situation to be that guiding point, right?
[00:19:23] And to make sure that everyone’s pointed and rowing in the same direction once you decide what direction that is. Can you talk a little bit about that ability to have kind of the bigger picture in mind and then being the person who is able to see that bigger picture and then funnel that through to the right people to cause action because what it strikes hearing you talk about that, it makes me think of, something that IT leaders talk about a lot, which is gaining a seat at the table.
Gaining a seat at the table
[00:19:51] A lot of younger first, starting out in their careers, moving into the leadership phase. Trying to kind of navigate that can be tricky, being the people who actually get a seat at the table and are actually leading in a level that it sounds like you definitely were. So any advice for them when they see themselves in that position? Or making sure that they develop so they can be effective in that way.
[00:20:12] John: Yeah. I think, you know, it’s interesting. So I think getting a seat at the table, many times you have to pull yourself away from your technical role. So, you know, there’s a gentleman who used to report to me at a different company, and he wanted to get promoted, and I asked him, I said, what’s your title, and he said, technical director, and I said, whenever you lose the technical, you’ll get promoted.
[00:20:33] And it’s one of those things that it took him a while to understand, but what I would say is our pride and kind of what we feel is our, you know, our differentiator is our technical abilities. But I think to get a seat at the table, sometimes you have to lose the technical to get a seat at the table with those that are not. Because that’s, that’s where you actually become their peer group versus the peer group you typically engage with on a daily basis. So I’d look to who you want to see the table with and become them. Right?
[00:21:03] Try to figure out how they think. Think about, do you have the right business acumen? Do you have the right problem solving skills without going technical? Are you able to articulate in a way that is understandable by the population you’re speaking with versus the population you work with. I think it’s two different things.
[00:21:22] You got to really consider and again, I would go back to my history. If you think about, as a builder or a building architect, the architect is not the one who’s building the building. They will guide the builders later with the electrical engineers and the plumbers and the structural engineers, they’ll help do that including the general contractor that’s on site, but the role of an architect is to be the designer.
[00:21:47] The role of an architect is to be the communicator. The role of an architect is to ask the five whys. Why do you want this? Why do you need this? To really make sure you’re really pinpointing the solution so when you come out of it, it’s accurate. I think what I would also say is I think the industry is kind of pivoted, I’m going a little bit different than maybe what your question was, but I think that’s why we’re in this kind of agile methodology now versus waterfall, that two in the box mentality, right?
[00:22:13] Because you’re trying to get the business and technologists together so they can actually learn how to communicate better. Because the closer you interact, the more frequent you interact, the more you start learning people’s language. And it’s no different than going overseas and being you know, in Italy for a month. Eventually you’re going to understand a little bit of Italian, even though you don’t know Italian, because you’re going to have to learn how to survive and know how to order water or something.
[00:22:38] Same thing in business. The more you can work with the business, the more you speak their language versus them yours, is probably where you get a seat at the table. But I would say in today’s world, I’m a huge advocate of the two in the box. Because the business becomes more technologist, and the technologist becomes more business.
[00:22:55] And it really allows that communication to flow without this translator as an architect in the middle or as a CIO in the middle.
[00:23:02] Jonathan: It’s, we’re advocating for immersion, immersion programs, basically.
[00:23:07] John: Absolutely.
[00:23:08] Jonathan: Let’s talk a little bit about fear. This is the IT Horror Stories podcast. You know, I noticed in telling your stories there, we didn’t really touch on the points, you know, you were able to react quickly and, and work with the team and leverage others, their expertise.
[00:23:24] Were there moments when you felt fear, and that could have been the fear of making the wrong choice. It could have been, you know, the fear of being maybe perceived a different way. In those moments, I mean, was it easy or were there hard things? Where does the fear live in those moments and how did you overcome it?
Compartmentalizing to overcome fear
[00:23:44] John: Yeah, I think everybody has fear, but I think it’s how it’s displayed or how you realize that. It’s something you, you’ve really got to think through. You know, I think, you know, years ago, a good friend of mine was friends with Muhammad Ali. And Muhammad Ali once said, he said, When you get angry, you lose.
[00:24:02] Because fighting and boxing is an art. It’s a sport, right? And if you start street fighting, you know, those that are trained in how to be a sport will win, right? So I really kind of thought through that through the years and I realized how wise that was. And I think as a leader, yes, you have the fear, but you can’t display it. You can’t feel, you can’t focus on that. If your fear is: make a decision, you won’t make a decision. You’ve got to realize that you have to make a decision, you just need to make sure that you’re making the right decision for yourself.
[00:24:35] You make it with the information you have at hand, but you can stand behind that as long as you can explain why. I think it’s very hard for someone to criticize you later because they were not in that position at the time. You have to figure out how to do that. Now I will tell you, there’s probably health problems that come with that.
[00:24:50] Because you kind of shove those feelings down, the stresses get shoved down. I think in a leadership position, sometimes you can’t show the outward emotion of what you may feel internally. But I also say that, at least for me, I think, my wife may differ. I think I have a way of segmenting that fear and that emotion from the decision making and the design. As a technology leader, you have to have a design mode. You have to have an engineering problem solve mode. And then you have to have this emotion mode, and they’re not the same. The emotion mode many times has to be segmented and pushed aside, because you have to focus on the solution, and decisions that you have, but that is between the design and the information gathering.
[00:25:31] Jonathan: Your wife is going to be the guest on the next episode, so we’ll get her take on that.
[00:25:35] John: Please don’t. Ha ha ha.
[00:25:37] Jonathan: The crisis mode sometimes it’s okay, well, we’re moving forward there. We’re going to focus on the actions we’re going to act and that in and of itself, becomes your focus and maybe helps with that a bit.
[00:25:50] Well, before we wrap up here, let’s talk about some things that maybe are keeping you up at night nowadays. You’ve gone through these, you’ve had a variety of leadership positions, you’ve seen it all, really, I’m sure. And yet, of course, there’s going to be new challenges that pop up. What are some of the things that you are concerned about, or it kind of keeps you up at night now?
Things that go bump in the night
[00:26:12] John: I think the rapid pace of change is one thing that keeps me up at night. I think especially, we’re all hearing about the AI and, you know, certainly AI has been around for many, many years. But I think what’s happening is the consumerization of AI. Just like the consumerization of technology several years ago, you had the big HPs and IBMs and Dells that actually drove the innovation.
[00:26:36] And they basically are the ones that actually put out in the market what they thought the consumer wanted. And I think Apple changed that. Years ago and almost flipped it around where the consumer is the one that says this is what I want. And then people build it for them. But the consumerization of technology has happened for years.
[00:26:52] I think what we’re now seeing is the consumerization of data, the consumerization of artificial intelligence, and it’s going to change the industries, and especially retail in my world is going to change it dramatically. From an outside in perspective. I think internal companies, we’re all going to go through this, because the, we still have consumers and customers inside our business partners.
[00:27:14] They’re the ones that are saying, Hey, I need this piece of data. I need to make this decision. They’re going to look for this kind of natural way of accessing data. It’s certainly something that we’ve focused on over the years through natural language processing, you know, machine learning, but it’s just becoming much more conversational architecture.
[00:27:31] And then putting the intelligence behind there. I think that’s one thing that keeps me up at night, but it’s also very exciting. It’s probably one of the most exciting points in my career outside the invention of the internet. Which, yes, I did live through, and saw Mosaic and, and all those really come up in service in completely different ways than we’ve ever seen before.
[00:27:49] But it’s, I think it’s going to be very exciting, and two of the strategies that I have currently is this concept of augmented intelligence, and autonomous operations. I think as technologists, we’re always looking for our operations to be the most intelligent and almost take care of itself through self-healing and all this sort of stuff.
[00:28:08] But our jobs are also to serve the intelligence to our companies through information and through the data analysts and those sort of things. But I think these two things coming together where you start thinking about how systems talk to systems, how AI talks to AI, how, you know, business starts creating rules.
[00:28:25] Those rules create boundaries and constraints. It’s going to be fascinating the way corporations run moving forward. I’m under the belief that if you can set your corporation up in a way that’s almost modeled through metrics. Folks from my company are watching this right now, they’re probably going to laugh, but, you know, if you could set your company up through a series of metrics, then those metrics, with boundaries could almost, if you put intelligence over top, it could almost balance itself, it can make its own decisions because you’ve set up the rules, you set up the constraints, you said, if this happens, don’t do this.
[00:28:56] And especially in retail, I think there’s ways in the future you’re going to be able to have almost a self driving retail system. And then the humans are the ones that actually set those rules and constraints to continue to refine those decision patterns.
[00:29:10] Again, I find it very intriguing what’s going to happen in the future.
[00:29:14] Jonathan: Absolutely. I mean, I can tell you’ve got that design background. The design part of your brain is really lighting up when you, when you talk about this stuff. Things are developing so quickly and changing so rapidly as you pointed out. Is embracing more of that design way of thinking a little bit the way to go or any other advice for them?
“We all have to be architects.”
[00:29:34] John: Yeah, no, for sure. I think we all have to be architects. We all have to have that design brain. We’re not just engineers, but we have to have that design background. We should all, I don’t care whether you’re a project manager or whether you’re someone coming up through the engineering organization, you have to have that, that architectural mindset.
[00:29:52] And it comes with two portions. One is, “serve the customer needs with whoever that customer is.” It could be internal business partners or external customers and then that problem solving solution execution. Execution cannot be understated. You can’t just be a designer or you never get anything done.
[00:30:07] We could design ourselves into a hole. But you also have to have the execution side. But I think if I were to take step back and say there’s probably soft skills. It’s something we sometimes overlook, it’s incredibly important. I go back to your question of how do I get a seat at the table? That comes with the soft skills, not technical skills, typically.
[00:30:27] For those of us who have come through many different companies, there’s different types of companies as well. And I would say that there’s a cultural difference with a lot of different companies, and I think all too often when we look at our next step in our careers, we look at the job description, the skills, we look at the compensation, and we look at the long term value that serves us.
[00:30:48] I think the other thing you need to really consider. And maybe balance with the compensation is, is it the right role for you? Is it the right style of company for you? It’s the culture of that company. And I can tell you with someone who’s come through many, many different companies, I’ve worked with some, I’ve worked with, I’ll quote, one company that was the most horrible company I’ve ever worked in my entire life.
[00:31:10] I was brought there to help with that cultural transformation. Not sure I achieved it 100%. But I tell you, it was a very difficult company to work in, but I think at that time, I had to focus on my own leadership skills and really stay true to myself. I think that sometimes we don’t pay enough attention to who we are and how we like to work and how we like to work with others.
[00:31:33] But I would say, always when you’re in the interview process or when you’re in a company, really try to be comfortable with that because I think that’s the way you excel. So I would say, the importance of that culture cannot be understated. I, to give my current company a plug right now, I work, as you said, with Wawa. Best company I ever worked in my life. We are a fast growing company on the East Coast, moving into the Ohio Valley. But, I can’t speak highly enough about this company and how much of a cultural fit it is for me. It may not be for others, but it is for me, and I would say it is for the 45,000 people that work here.
[00:32:09] They work here for a reason, and a lot of that reason is because we have a great culture.
[00:32:14] Jonathan: Amazing. Well, John, thank you so much for taking time. I mean, I think it’s clear that horror stories are going to happen and especially in this field and all fields, but especially this one, especially with the pace of change and everything and keeping in mind who you’re going to be facing those horror stories with, and shaping yourself to make sure that you’re going to be able to be resilient and confident with who you’re working with. It sounds like that’s a really good takeaway for folks. I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing your story. We’ll talk with you again in the future.
[00:32:48] John: Okay, thank you, Jonathan.
[00:32:50] Jonathan: All right. Take care, everyone. Thanks for listening!
Introduction
[00:00:14] Jonathan Crowe: Hello, and welcome. Please come in. Join me. I’m Jonathan Crowe, Director of Community at NinjaOne and this, this is IT Horror Stories. Brought to you by NinjaOne, the leader in automated endpoint management.
[00:00:31] Jonathan: Welcome, everyone, to another IT Horror Stories. I’m your host, Jonathan Crowe, director of community at NinjaOne, and for today’s episode, I’m very excited to have John Collier. He’s the CIO and SVP at Philadelphia and Pennsylvania’s pride, Wawa. John, thanks so much for taking time and coming on the show.
[00:00:49] John: Absolutely, Jonathan. Nice to be here and look forward to having the conversation.
[00:00:52] Jonathan: So, John, I understand that prior to being your, your role now, the CIO and SVP at Wawa, that you actually had your first CIO role at a fairly young age. Can you give us a little bit of a background in terms of how you got there and how you got to where you are today?
Architect by design
[00:01:09] John: Yeah, so I think maybe starting out, just to give you a little bit of background on me, is I did not go to school for computer science. I actually went to school for building architecture. So, if you look at my red thread throughout my career, it’s all been around design and, and problem solving. So, earlier in my career I worked for a large engineering company.
[00:01:27] 26 offices, about 2. 3 billion dollars. And I had the opportunity to become CIO, or what they termed at that point as Principal of Technology and Partner, at age of 27. So, I got a really good opportunity to step into a leadership role about four years out of college and got a chance to lead a great organization and help build that organization into more of a technology company that served the construction and design industry.
[00:01:55] So it was a lot of fun. It taught me a lot because I got to do a lot of hands on, which I think served me well to really get a base understanding of technology. I would also add that I did this in Silicon Valley. So when Silicon Valley was growing up, I was there with David Packard and that team, working with HP and others to help design buildings for them.
[00:02:17] So, it gave me a chance to really see the dot com or the technology industry really boom in California. So I got a chance to grow through that, not only in my role, but also the friends and individuals that I had relationships with outside of work.
[00:02:33] Jonathan: And so I imagine too, at that type of company, you mentioned getting more hands on experience. So, now that you’ve had some other CIO positions, would you describe that as a different set where it was your scope a little bit wider than it is now?
[00:02:49] John: At that time it was probably more narrow, but it gave me a chance to do things that you normally wouldn’t do. As far as running cable systems, who as a CIO actually gets her hands dirty and is stringing cables through the office. Who actually is looking at RAID drives and helping set up, set up parity drives.
[00:03:09] So it gave me a chance to really see how the support organization did their jobs and to really live it through their eyes. But also take that, understand the skills of each of them, and then figure out how to maybe lead them and help guide them in a different way than maybe what they’ve seen before.
[00:03:26] Jonathan: And you mentioned having that design background too. And that being a key in how you approach these positions. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
[00:03:33] John: Most things we do in technology, do require some kind of forethought of what you’re building. As a building architect, you know, you have a client that comes to you and says that they want a certain type of house, and you ask a lot of why questions. And that’s really no different than in corporate America, where you have business partners that are trying to accomplish something, whether it be through increased revenue or customer count, and it gives you a chance to really problem solve with them, to really understand and extract out of them what they’re trying to accomplish.
[00:03:56] And then translate that to your engineering and architectural organization to start designing that solution. So I think it really has served me well to really be on the design side and then be able to translate that back in such a way that not only can I communicate to the business, but also I can communicate technically to the technology team.
[00:04:15] And I think sometimes that translation is lost with technical folks.
[00:04:20] Jonathan: Absolutely. Would you say you kind of approach it too in the mindset of, you know, technology in and of itself is just a tool. It’s an end, it’s what we utilize to meet a higher goal. Is that right?
[00:04:32] John: Yeah, absolutely. I think technology is just a kit of parts. No different than building a building, right? You have storage, right? You have networks, you have different components, different applications, and many times it’s how you orchestrate those to meet the business need that’s most important. So it tends to be, you know, I refer to it as the Legos. You’re designing with a set of Legos. You have all these pieces you put together in many, many different ways. But it’s the same basic parts. It’s just how you put them together and orchestrate the data flows throughout that, that really gives you a solution. So I find it very intriguing and really have enjoyed my career in watching some of the really good engineers and architects design that future technology.
When the Lego table starts to shake
[00:05:11] Jonathan: So let’s talk about when that Lego table starts to shake, and you’re now under pressure to react quickly. And you mentioned being put into a leadership level at a fairly young age. You’re now in charge of leading groups of people who in some cases have been in their careers longer than you.
[00:05:30] I understand that the first story that you wanted to talk about is hitting at that time in your career. You had just joined the company that you’re gonna be talking about. And so, not only were you coming in as a relatively young CIO, you also were new to this company.
[00:05:47] John: Yes. So again, I was a young CIO in a non… I would say in a private company. And this just happened to be my first public company I went into, and the company was Williams Sonoma. Great company, great products. I’m advertising for them right now. But you know, and I came in, and two weeks after I started, I had the store support operations team really to make sure that the stores are operational, make sure they’re meeting the customer needs, and really taking care, and making sure we can do transactions, on a daily basis. So, two weeks into my time there, and this probably impacted a lot of folks, but 9/11 occurred. Two weeks into it. September 11th, 2001.
[00:06:27] Those of us who lived through it, it really kind of changed our perspective in many ways, and in my perspective as a new technologist working for my first public company. That morning was very eye opening, not only was eye opening to see what’s happening on the video.
[00:06:42] I’m at home, you can see, you can see something happen around 5:45 in the morning. I get into the office because my pager and things are going off. I go walk into the office and we had multiple screens, typically those screens are watching and monitoring stores.
[00:06:55] In this case, a few of those screens were actually watching the news, and watching the planes hit, and watching the buildings collapse. But at the same time, we had our other metrics up that looks at transaction rates. It looks at, you know, issues that are happening within the stores. Are the networks working properly?
[00:07:11] So you had that, those two sort of views. And what started happening is we had to make some decisions. Because we did not know, like most folks that were experiencing this, we didn’t know where this was going to, where it was going to go. There were threats on, in San Francisco, which is where I was working, there were threats on the Bank of America Tower.
[00:07:29] And so we had to start making some decisions, of do we shut down stores? And at that time, I think we had four, four hundred, five hundred stores. And me being the new leader of this area, I had to start making some decisions without even knowing my team’s name, many of them. But I had to start looking at the data, listening to them and start to decide, you know, what do we do?
[00:07:50] Because we were starting to see the transactions fall off and there was this call to action of making sure we protect the customer. There was that customer mindset. From the first moment of saying, you know, if we stay open, yes, we can make more money, but that if we stay open, we’re also maybe putting our customers at risk because they’re out in public.
[00:08:07] So we made the decision, I made the decision, to start shutting down some of those stores, but I had to do it with a sense of urgency and I had to do it with a team that didn’t know me, but they had to trust my decisions and they had to trust what they are also telling me. So it was a very collaborative approach.
[00:08:24] But again, it started with that customer mindset and that balance between system availability and customer interaction. What I realized, brand new to this company, is the level of complexity of our system. So shutting down the store wasn’t as easy as flipping a switch.
[00:08:39] You had to systematically shut things down in a fashion that you could save the transactions, make sure things came up properly after you recovered, but I would tell you the communication was key. The triage that we had to work ourselves through was key and, I would tell you more importantly, the leadership in a crisis management situation was probably the thing that really got into my mindset and it really changed the way I think about things moving forward. Whether that be a consumer breach as many of you or some of the viewers may be may have experience. But crisis management and being a leader in crisis mode earlier in my career, really, it made me realize that even though I may be stressed, although I may be not knowing what decisions to make based on the data I had, it was still being seen as me making that decision with my partnership with my team.
[00:09:30] And it really has served me well through my career, whatever other crisis I may have faced.
[00:09:36] Jonathan: In that moment when a lot of the eyes in the room turned to you and you realized that you need to start stepping into that role and leading, what were some of the things that you think helped you respond in that moment?
[00:09:50] John: Having been in the decision making role very young and then coming to this, I mean, they’re just different decisions. This was a single decision that took a lot of effort to take, to execute it. So it was harder to make that single decision of shutting down the stores, but there was a long tail to actually executing on that and rolling one store at a time offline and going from east to west coast because that’s that’s the way we took him down.
[00:10:17] I would also say that you know you had to really watch people’s demeanor. There were stresses in the room. There were people that wanted to get home to their own families. No different than working out of Miami and working through hurricanes. You have people that are, that have family on one side or trying to take care of a company on the other side, but that you had to maintain focus or you’re going to hurt the company, and individuals because the results of what we did, whether it’s in a crisis mode or not, it will eventually reflect on them as well. Did we do it right? Did we do it with consistency and good quality? So you have to maintain that focus of your team, although their head’s probably somewhere else at the time as well.
[00:10:55] Jonathan: Understandably so. Had there had to have been some emergency kind of shutdowns or anything like that that would help prepare the team for, okay, at least we have a playbook to follow?
[00:11:04] John: Yeah, there is. I mean, like many companies, I mean, I think it’s very important to have a disaster playbook. Kind of a business continuity and a disaster recovery plan that was brought forward. We knew how to shut it down. The team had, not in this scale, but they knew how to shut down a store.
[00:11:23] It was just more of the scale, and because that’s never happened before. No one, no one shuts down their whole company deliberately, and then really thinking through how to prioritize the stores, was probably one of the bigger decisions of where do we start, how do we start, what are our biggest sales volume stores, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:11:39] So there were things that you had to work through, but yes, there was a playbook. I was unfamiliar with it. So that’s where, again, that relationship with my team came into focus.
[00:11:51] Jonathan: It’s there to be able to be utilized and adapted, but of course, there are going to be some things where it doesn’t apply exactly to each and every possible scenario. You’re going to have to work within that and make, call some audibles or make some other decisions, prioritize. Do you have any recollections of how you were doing that? I mean, you mentioned, okay, what data do we have? It’s going to be limited. We’re not going to be able to have all the data to be able to make a 100 percent confident choice right now of what is the right thing to do, but we have to act.
[00:12:25] And so can you walk through a little bit, just that thought process and how you worked with your team to get as much data as you could to make decisions confidently.
Making decisions confidently in crisis
[00:12:35] John: Yeah, I think, again, we were watching the networks to make sure, again, the time frame is 2001, so a little different network and, you know, than we have today. Part of it was, is do we have connectivity, right? So, there’s things you had to look at to make sure that you could maintain some level of connectivity while you were shutting them down.
[00:12:56] Making sure we execute the actions properly, but then also make sure that the results were what we expected. Did we actually make sure we had the data bushes shut down properly? Did we put it in a position that could go dormant or hybrid for a while, hibernate for a while so we could actually bring it back online without having, you know, databases that were corrupted or something else.
[00:13:16] So there were a lot of things we did, but we had to do it in a very systematic fashion. I don’t remember all the details about how we moved east to west. I just remember it was really stressful, especially being two weeks on the job, but, you know, coming out of it, you know, I would tell you, a week or whatever, after we got done talking about the event, we did kind of reflect on how well we work together.
[00:13:37] And I really thank the team for their leadership, not mine, but their leadership, because they really helped the company through that crisis.
Switching gears
[00:13:45] Jonathan: Thank you for sharing that one. And let’s move on to your next one because in some ways it’s very different. We’re skipping ahead a little bit in terms of timeline in your career. And you’re going to be facing much more of a different crisis here, but you’re finding yourself once again, kind of in one of those war rooms. So let’s get into your second story.
[00:14:06] John: I was an executive leader, Senior Vice President at Countrywide, and subsequently became a Chief Architect at Bank of America. But, to set the scenario. It was 2008. We all remember what 2008 was, it was the financial crisis. It started with the loan industry. And Countrywide was the largest loan processor in the industry.
[00:14:30] And we were processing millions of loans and what it was is you’re actually managing risk. So the portfolios that loans you buy, you’re just buying risk and then you’re allocating and selling that risk off to different companies. So you’re, you’re servicing what they call servicing these loans. We had some inkling that there was going to be some type of collapse.
[00:14:53] I wouldn’t have said that back then, but looking back, that’s the word I would have used. We had some leadership internally that were kind of throwing up red flags. To kind of set the stage so I don’t throw Countrywide completely underneath the bus, there were a lot of government, regulatory and, and really incentives to do exotic loans.
[00:15:10] So, you got to think of the time is these companies were very healthy until you got into this exotic loan selling. And then the amount of decision points that you made whether you know, whether you’re alive, do you have the amount of funds in their thing? Do you have any kids… all these kind of data sets that allowed you to really understand whether that loan was a good loan or not, went away and I think if we went from 14 decision points down to two. And you can imagine when you’re making decisions points of two is are you alive and are you human? Not an animal, although there were some animals that actually had, took out loans at the time.
[00:15:25] There, you really… there was some loans that were taken out by animals because we just didn’t have those points in place. But you went down to two points so you can make loan decisions faster. But that collapse really threw us into a crisis mode and at the time I remember we, it was like more than 70 percent of our loans that we bought on a Thursday.
[00:16:05] On Friday, we did some recalculations and took more time to make, to look at those decision engines, and realized that more than 70 percent of them we should not have purchased. The risk profile was completely off. But when you’re actually competing with Wall Street, these sub second trades on Wall Street and you’re competing with Morgan Stanley’s of the world you have to make a trade based on the information you had.
[00:16:26] So, here we are buying these loans, 70 percent are bad, and we are driving down the entire industry and we were, if we didn’t make better decisions faster, we were going to drive the loan mortgage industry into turmoil, which is what happened. But we were trying to pull it out of the ditch. Friday afternoon, we pulled our entire teams together, engineering teams, etc.
[00:16:48] And we realized we have to build this massive grid compute. So we had everybody in a war room. Trying to understand what it is we could do, how many decision points we need to make, how much compute that would take, how many loans we need to process, within a minute or even a sub second, scenario to really figure out how to pull this thing out of the ditch.
[00:17:06] Now we did not succeed. It still collapsed, but the amount of compute that we threw out at this in a very short amount of time was just amazing. And it was a technical challenge that I had never faced. And again, this is, you know, probably five years after my Williams Sonoma. Seven years after that.
Letting teams do what they do best
[00:17:22] Again, trying to make a different decision, but this was, this was a design decision, not a crisis management decision, although there was crisis in this. But you had architects, business partners, engineers, and I realized the importance of great engineering and how important that was and let the engineers be engineers. And what I learned from that as a leader is, you know, how do you focus on the team? Let them do what they do best. How do you let them do what they do better than you? And I would say a lot of leaders sometimes think they know best, and they don’t. Right? Let the people who do the job, do the job. Your job is to understand what they need and support them. The, in these type of modes, and I would say in leadership in general, we refer to it as servant leadership.
[00:18:04] I think all too often when leaders get in a position and they think they are the leader. It’s not really true. Your teams are the ones that lead. You’re the one that helps clear the way for them. So I think it’s very important to keep that in perspective. I think that’s realized through these crisis events, whether it be the 9/11 event or this, be the crisis of 2008 with financial collapse.
[00:18:25] Let them be the specialists and let them ask you or tell you what you, they need you to clear out of the way for them to let them do their job. So, I think that’s what I’ve realized through my career is you may be at the top of the hierarchy, but your job is to serve.
[00:18:43] Jonathan: So you’re the alpha, but I mean, it’s the pack. The pack is what’s important.
[00:18:46] John: Very much so. Very much so.
[00:18:48] Jonathan: You know, thinking about that scenario, obviously, right, not exactly the same level of, okay, there’s an immediate crisis, the clock is ticking, we need to act fast. But you’re still feeling that pressure, you know, you had seen, okay, there’s a very clear business need.
[00:19:02] And we need to respond to it. And the solution here is revolving around leveraging technology and some very highly skilled people and being able to rally them really quickly. And so, absolutely. The servant leadership makes sense. But you’re also kind of there to, like in the other situation to be that guiding point, right?
[00:19:23] And to make sure that everyone’s pointed and rowing in the same direction once you decide what direction that is. Can you talk a little bit about that ability to have kind of the bigger picture in mind and then being the person who is able to see that bigger picture and then funnel that through to the right people to cause action because what it strikes hearing you talk about that, it makes me think of, something that IT leaders talk about a lot, which is gaining a seat at the table.
Gaining a seat at the table
[00:19:51] A lot of younger first, starting out in their careers, moving into the leadership phase. Trying to kind of navigate that can be tricky, being the people who actually get a seat at the table and are actually leading in a level that it sounds like you definitely were. So any advice for them when they see themselves in that position? Or making sure that they develop so they can be effective in that way.
[00:20:12] John: Yeah. I think, you know, it’s interesting. So I think getting a seat at the table, many times you have to pull yourself away from your technical role. So, you know, there’s a gentleman who used to report to me at a different company, and he wanted to get promoted, and I asked him, I said, what’s your title, and he said, technical director, and I said, whenever you lose the technical, you’ll get promoted.
[00:20:33] And it’s one of those things that it took him a while to understand, but what I would say is our pride and kind of what we feel is our, you know, our differentiator is our technical abilities. But I think to get a seat at the table, sometimes you have to lose the technical to get a seat at the table with those that are not. Because that’s, that’s where you actually become their peer group versus the peer group you typically engage with on a daily basis. So I’d look to who you want to see the table with and become them. Right?
[00:21:03] Try to figure out how they think. Think about, do you have the right business acumen? Do you have the right problem solving skills without going technical? Are you able to articulate in a way that is understandable by the population you’re speaking with versus the population you work with. I think it’s two different things.
[00:21:22] You got to really consider and again, I would go back to my history. If you think about, as a builder or a building architect, the architect is not the one who’s building the building. They will guide the builders later with the electrical engineers and the plumbers and the structural engineers, they’ll help do that including the general contractor that’s on site, but the role of an architect is to be the designer.
[00:21:47] The role of an architect is to be the communicator. The role of an architect is to ask the five whys. Why do you want this? Why do you need this? To really make sure you’re really pinpointing the solution so when you come out of it, it’s accurate. I think what I would also say is I think the industry is kind of pivoted, I’m going a little bit different than maybe what your question was, but I think that’s why we’re in this kind of agile methodology now versus waterfall, that two in the box mentality, right?
[00:22:13] Because you’re trying to get the business and technologists together so they can actually learn how to communicate better. Because the closer you interact, the more frequent you interact, the more you start learning people’s language. And it’s no different than going overseas and being you know, in Italy for a month. Eventually you’re going to understand a little bit of Italian, even though you don’t know Italian, because you’re going to have to learn how to survive and know how to order water or something.
[00:22:38] Same thing in business. The more you can work with the business, the more you speak their language versus them yours, is probably where you get a seat at the table. But I would say in today’s world, I’m a huge advocate of the two in the box. Because the business becomes more technologist, and the technologist becomes more business.
[00:22:55] And it really allows that communication to flow without this translator as an architect in the middle or as a CIO in the middle.
[00:23:02] Jonathan: It’s, we’re advocating for immersion, immersion programs, basically.
[00:23:07] John: Absolutely.
[00:23:08] Jonathan: Let’s talk a little bit about fear. This is the IT Horror Stories podcast. You know, I noticed in telling your stories there, we didn’t really touch on the points, you know, you were able to react quickly and, and work with the team and leverage others, their expertise.
[00:23:24] Were there moments when you felt fear, and that could have been the fear of making the wrong choice. It could have been, you know, the fear of being maybe perceived a different way. In those moments, I mean, was it easy or were there hard things? Where does the fear live in those moments and how did you overcome it?
Compartmentalizing to overcome fear
[00:23:44] John: Yeah, I think everybody has fear, but I think it’s how it’s displayed or how you realize that. It’s something you, you’ve really got to think through. You know, I think, you know, years ago, a good friend of mine was friends with Muhammad Ali. And Muhammad Ali once said, he said, When you get angry, you lose.
[00:24:02] Because fighting and boxing is an art. It’s a sport, right? And if you start street fighting, you know, those that are trained in how to be a sport will win, right? So I really kind of thought through that through the years and I realized how wise that was. And I think as a leader, yes, you have the fear, but you can’t display it. You can’t feel, you can’t focus on that. If your fear is: make a decision, you won’t make a decision. You’ve got to realize that you have to make a decision, you just need to make sure that you’re making the right decision for yourself.
[00:24:35] You make it with the information you have at hand, but you can stand behind that as long as you can explain why. I think it’s very hard for someone to criticize you later because they were not in that position at the time. You have to figure out how to do that. Now I will tell you, there’s probably health problems that come with that.
[00:24:50] Because you kind of shove those feelings down, the stresses get shoved down. I think in a leadership position, sometimes you can’t show the outward emotion of what you may feel internally. But I also say that, at least for me, I think, my wife may differ. I think I have a way of segmenting that fear and that emotion from the decision making and the design. As a technology leader, you have to have a design mode. You have to have an engineering problem solve mode. And then you have to have this emotion mode, and they’re not the same. The emotion mode many times has to be segmented and pushed aside, because you have to focus on the solution, and decisions that you have, but that is between the design and the information gathering.
[00:25:31] Jonathan: Your wife is going to be the guest on the next episode, so we’ll get her take on that.
[00:25:35] John: Please don’t. Ha ha ha.
[00:25:37] Jonathan: The crisis mode sometimes it’s okay, well, we’re moving forward there. We’re going to focus on the actions we’re going to act and that in and of itself, becomes your focus and maybe helps with that a bit.
[00:25:50] Well, before we wrap up here, let’s talk about some things that maybe are keeping you up at night nowadays. You’ve gone through these, you’ve had a variety of leadership positions, you’ve seen it all, really, I’m sure. And yet, of course, there’s going to be new challenges that pop up. What are some of the things that you are concerned about, or it kind of keeps you up at night now?
Things that go bump in the night
[00:26:12] John: I think the rapid pace of change is one thing that keeps me up at night. I think especially, we’re all hearing about the AI and, you know, certainly AI has been around for many, many years. But I think what’s happening is the consumerization of AI. Just like the consumerization of technology several years ago, you had the big HPs and IBMs and Dells that actually drove the innovation.
[00:26:36] And they basically are the ones that actually put out in the market what they thought the consumer wanted. And I think Apple changed that. Years ago and almost flipped it around where the consumer is the one that says this is what I want. And then people build it for them. But the consumerization of technology has happened for years.
[00:26:52] I think what we’re now seeing is the consumerization of data, the consumerization of artificial intelligence, and it’s going to change the industries, and especially retail in my world is going to change it dramatically. From an outside in perspective. I think internal companies, we’re all going to go through this, because the, we still have consumers and customers inside our business partners.
[00:27:14] They’re the ones that are saying, Hey, I need this piece of data. I need to make this decision. They’re going to look for this kind of natural way of accessing data. It’s certainly something that we’ve focused on over the years through natural language processing, you know, machine learning, but it’s just becoming much more conversational architecture.
[00:27:31] And then putting the intelligence behind there. I think that’s one thing that keeps me up at night, but it’s also very exciting. It’s probably one of the most exciting points in my career outside the invention of the internet. Which, yes, I did live through, and saw Mosaic and, and all those really come up in service in completely different ways than we’ve ever seen before.
[00:27:49] But it’s, I think it’s going to be very exciting, and two of the strategies that I have currently is this concept of augmented intelligence, and autonomous operations. I think as technologists, we’re always looking for our operations to be the most intelligent and almost take care of itself through self-healing and all this sort of stuff.
[00:28:08] But our jobs are also to serve the intelligence to our companies through information and through the data analysts and those sort of things. But I think these two things coming together where you start thinking about how systems talk to systems, how AI talks to AI, how, you know, business starts creating rules.
[00:28:25] Those rules create boundaries and constraints. It’s going to be fascinating the way corporations run moving forward. I’m under the belief that if you can set your corporation up in a way that’s almost modeled through metrics. Folks from my company are watching this right now, they’re probably going to laugh, but, you know, if you could set your company up through a series of metrics, then those metrics, with boundaries could almost, if you put intelligence over top, it could almost balance itself, it can make its own decisions because you’ve set up the rules, you set up the constraints, you said, if this happens, don’t do this.
[00:28:56] And especially in retail, I think there’s ways in the future you’re going to be able to have almost a self driving retail system. And then the humans are the ones that actually set those rules and constraints to continue to refine those decision patterns.
[00:29:10] Again, I find it very intriguing what’s going to happen in the future.
[00:29:14] Jonathan: Absolutely. I mean, I can tell you’ve got that design background. The design part of your brain is really lighting up when you, when you talk about this stuff. Things are developing so quickly and changing so rapidly as you pointed out. Is embracing more of that design way of thinking a little bit the way to go or any other advice for them?
“We all have to be architects.”
[00:29:34] John: Yeah, no, for sure. I think we all have to be architects. We all have to have that design brain. We’re not just engineers, but we have to have that design background. We should all, I don’t care whether you’re a project manager or whether you’re someone coming up through the engineering organization, you have to have that, that architectural mindset.
[00:29:52] And it comes with two portions. One is, “serve the customer needs with whoever that customer is.” It could be internal business partners or external customers and then that problem solving solution execution. Execution cannot be understated. You can’t just be a designer or you never get anything done.
[00:30:07] We could design ourselves into a hole. But you also have to have the execution side. But I think if I were to take step back and say there’s probably soft skills. It’s something we sometimes overlook, it’s incredibly important. I go back to your question of how do I get a seat at the table? That comes with the soft skills, not technical skills, typically.
[00:30:27] For those of us who have come through many different companies, there’s different types of companies as well. And I would say that there’s a cultural difference with a lot of different companies, and I think all too often when we look at our next step in our careers, we look at the job description, the skills, we look at the compensation, and we look at the long term value that serves us.
[00:30:48] I think the other thing you need to really consider. And maybe balance with the compensation is, is it the right role for you? Is it the right style of company for you? It’s the culture of that company. And I can tell you with someone who’s come through many, many different companies, I’ve worked with some, I’ve worked with, I’ll quote, one company that was the most horrible company I’ve ever worked in my entire life.
[00:31:10] I was brought there to help with that cultural transformation. Not sure I achieved it 100%. But I tell you, it was a very difficult company to work in, but I think at that time, I had to focus on my own leadership skills and really stay true to myself. I think that sometimes we don’t pay enough attention to who we are and how we like to work and how we like to work with others.
[00:31:33] But I would say, always when you’re in the interview process or when you’re in a company, really try to be comfortable with that because I think that’s the way you excel. So I would say, the importance of that culture cannot be understated. I, to give my current company a plug right now, I work, as you said, with Wawa. Best company I ever worked in my life. We are a fast growing company on the East Coast, moving into the Ohio Valley. But, I can’t speak highly enough about this company and how much of a cultural fit it is for me. It may not be for others, but it is for me, and I would say it is for the 45,000 people that work here.
[00:32:09] They work here for a reason, and a lot of that reason is because we have a great culture.
[00:32:14] Jonathan: Amazing. Well, John, thank you so much for taking time. I mean, I think it’s clear that horror stories are going to happen and especially in this field and all fields, but especially this one, especially with the pace of change and everything and keeping in mind who you’re going to be facing those horror stories with, and shaping yourself to make sure that you’re going to be able to be resilient and confident with who you’re working with. It sounds like that’s a really good takeaway for folks. I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing your story. We’ll talk with you again in the future.
[00:32:48] John: Okay, thank you, Jonathan.
[00:32:50] Jonathan: All right. Take care, everyone. Thanks for listening!
