Kris Baritt | Client Engineering

Luke: Please join us for a conversation with Chris Barrett, VP of Technology for Client Engineering at IBM. Chris has his roots in development but has evolved to become a prominent IT executive. Our discussion will cover a variety of topics, including how he activates teams, develops new leaders, and has an affinity for hyper- growth moments. Before we welcome our guest, let's say hello to my co- host, Joe Sepi.

Joe Sepi: Hey, Luke. How are you my friend? How's the weather over there?

Luke: Good. How are you doing, Joe?

Joe Sepi: I'm okay. It looks like you're almost... Like you have a sun shower happening behind you. It's nice.

Luke: You commented last time that I looked like I wasn't getting any sun, so I thought I would do a little more production design and spruce it up.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, I-

Luke: So-

Joe Sepi: Go ahead.

Luke: I was going to say, also one of the things we talked about in one of our recent episodes was... We were like, " How did it get to Nicholas Hurricane already? Where are all these... It seems like more than I remember seeing in the news." So I did a little research, Joe, and I have the answer for you.

Joe Sepi: Oh, please. Yeah, update our listeners.

Luke: They don't all make landfall, so they don't really make the news.

Joe Sepi: Oh. But they name them all and that's why it goes through all the letters.

Luke: If it starts swirling and the wind reaches 39 miles per hour, it's a tropical storm and it gets a name.

Joe Sepi: Wow.

Luke: It's on a 6- year rotation of the names. And only if it's a deadly enough hurricane, do they retire the name. It's more information than you bargained for, Joe.

Joe Sepi: No, no. That's just the right amount of information I was looking for. I appreciate that.

Luke: You're welcome.

Joe Sepi: I was wondering too, I notice in my calls, if it's a sunny day, I look like I have really good light because my windows are right here. And today it's partially cloudy, so I feel like I don't have as much light on my face here. So I don't know if you or the listeners, the viewers, can tell what kind of weather I'm having based on my light. So-

Luke: Well, I'm curious what the weather's like in the Midwest. Maybe we should check in with our guest, Chris Barrett and find out.

Joe Sepi: Let's do this.

Luke: Welcome, Chris.

Kris: Hey, guys. How are you?

Joe Sepi: Good. How are you, Chris?

Kris: I'm great. Thanks for having me today.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. How's the weather over there? Where are you at?

Kris: Home is Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And it is not a beautiful day here. It's a little bluey, little cloudy, little hazy, mid- 60s, fall is in the air.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that sounds reasonable. That sounds reasonable. I don't know if we talked about this in any of our prep calls, but I spent 10 years in Chicago and spent a lot of time up in Milwaukee, and Madison, and stuff. It's lovely out there.

Kris: I spent about six living in Chicago. And when we had our firstborn, I was living in my ideal Lincoln Park condo, which I thought was going to be home forever. And I quickly realized that having a child and a 2- bedroom condo was not going to work. And your choices are either move west to Schaumburg area or move north, and I was working out west in Lyle and it was faster for me to drive from Milwaukee to Lyle than it was to drive from Lincoln Park to Lyle. So you're now residents of the great state of Wisconsin.

Joe Sepi: Nice. Yeah, that story actually is pretty common. I have a lot of friends that were like, " Oh, we have children now. We should get out of Chicago and go to the suburbs", or what have you.

Kris: Then when they get out of the house, you move back down there. That's what people do.

Joe Sepi: Yep, yep. Exactly. Cool. So where do we want to start? I think you have some announcements and stuff. Should we start with what you do and what's exciting right now?

Kris: I love the fact that you told me to prep that you're going to ask me what's exciting and so-

Joe Sepi: This isn't even the... This is the pre what's exciting part. I know you have exciting stuff that we want to talk about. Later on, I'll just generally what's exciting.

Kris: Sure. Maybe I'll start with a little bit of an overview of what our team does, and the ecosystem of IBM, and how we operate, and how I got here. So I'm somewhat new to the company. I think I just have my 6- month anniversary, but super excited to be here. I joined from Google. My boss here called me and recruited me. And one of the things he was looking for was, we were building out a team, pre- sales function that we call IBM client engineering, and over the past six months we've hired roughly... I'll be explicit here... 1, 200 ish people around the world into this pre- sales function. And we look at how we can execute and help our clients adopt our technology. We focus on things like Open Call Platform, OCP. We focus on Cloud Paks. We also focus on how we can activate them in a very quick and efficient way. And we're a very hands- on technical team. Our goal and objective is to get into the technology quickly, activate them and get the clients to touch the technology as fast as we possibly can. We've seen that when we showcase the value of the technology and how they can leverage it to change their business, it quickly becomes a very synergistic way that we interact with them. And overall, the reception in the six months of being in business inside client engineering, it's been very well received in the way that we execute and operate with them. So it's been super fun. We've hired a bunch of people, we've brought in a ton of new talent. We've brought in a bunch of people from inside the company as well into the organization. So we've got people that have been inside IBM for a long time. We've also got a lot of very early career professionals, and that has been an exciting, fun thing to hire into.

Joe Sepi: That's remarkable. And there's a lot there to dig into, which we'll get to I think the different components. But I'm curious, six months for you and 1, 200 hires, that's insane. Tell me more about how that's going, and I want to hear more.

Kris: Yeah, sure. So we'll start with what we look at when we try to hire people into the team. And this is something... I've been hiring and building teams for quite some time and I think that the three characteristics or traits that when we see in people, they become very successful in these types of roles. The first is technical depth that goes beneath the veneer. Those that have technical depth that goes deep, it serves them very well. They're innate problem solvers. They understand, they're passionate about technology as a whole and how it can be leveraged. The second trait I look for a lot in people that we hire is just bias for action and hustle. There's no substitution for that, like how fast we need to move in business. And it matters. Speed matters. And so we look for those that just have that built in, " I want to get things done hustle." And the last thing which I don't think you can train is just innate curiosity, intellectual curiosity and lifelong learners. Those that want to dig in, learn about new things, and are not afraid to get their hands dirty and just learn process, technology, whatever that may be. And those three things we've seen when we hire people that fit that mold, they're wildly successful here. They're wildly successful everywhere and we're really super excited to have those people join our team.

Joe Sepi: That makes a lot of sense. I see that in our org too, in the open tech organization, people are oriented towards action and we have shifting needs. We need stuff over here, over there, as long as people are ready to rock and roll, that's great.

Kris: I mean, they tend to have lots of fun. It's in places like this when we're growing fast and doing things like this, so it's just a great org to be part of.

Luke: I think that was one of my biggest surprises coming into the enterprise too is, how dynamic and exciting it is. There's this reputation of big business and enterprise maybe being a little slow paced or stodgy, but it's actually things are happening fast. They're happening at scale right away. It's a very exciting place to be.

Kris: Yeah, my boss's boss talks about the thing clock speed a lot, like how fast can we operate inside the organization to get things done? And we're continually looking for ways to improve that. One of the things that we've been working on a lot inside client engineering is how we improve speed and delivery. And so when we first started, we had one motion, we leveraged the Garage method, which has been inside IBM for a long time. And it's a well thought out, well executed way to help clients engage and leveraging design thinking to help them see the art of the possible, frame things in a way that are digestible, and build technology in very short sprints, Agile- based, that allows them to see and touch and feel an outcome. And we still do that and that is part of the core of what we continue to do. And we also looked at, how do we dedicate teams to our top clients? In our top 100 ish, 200 ish top clients, we are dedicating teams that become an extension of their team, an extension of how they operate and so they can feel very easy to go out and reach out to the IBM team that's there and engage with them. Another idea that we're working on and building out is an activation team where we can help customers quickly stand up OCP and activate it. We want to make that frictionless. The idea to activate a platform for them to be able to build on top of in a very quick amount of time is something that we're focused on. And then the other is around this idea of journeys. And we have a lot of clients that come to us and say, " I'm very interested in your security offering." Or, " I'm very interested in your data offering." Or, " I'm very interested in your operations offering." And we've got great ways to help them understand what the art of the possible is there from doing design thinking workshops or leveraging different ways that we've got to be able to help them get there.

Joe Sepi: So that's really interesting. And I think if I remember correctly from our prep call, in a way you're sort of dogfooding that activation of sorts because getting people from zero to where they want to be was something that you had to work on as well. Is that right?

Kris: Yeah, totally. Actually I like the fact that you used the word dogfooding. I said that here when I first got here, I went, " Oh, we should dogfood this." And someone said, " We're drinking orange champagne. We don't dogfood things." But we are doing a lot of that, and we are building repeatable processes and mechanisms that we can share with our clients, whether that be repeatable artifacts for things like architecture, deployment models, Ansible scripts to be able to help them take that automation and activate it. So one of the things that we've been working on is called the Client Architecture Center, which is a great place for clients to be able to go to and leverage the architecture and code that we're deploying out there, and so that they can take that, use that, share it with your teams. And we love the fact that when it comes back full circle, and that we've been working with them like, " Hey, this is a great piece of code that we should share as well." We like that idea of doing what we do and sharing it with others.

Luke: Well, thank you for sharing the insight into it because it's very interesting. A lot of times, especially if you're out... Like I'll be reading forums, particularly Hacker News, and a lot of times people will be like, " Oh, IBM. What does IBM even do?" And I think the answer, and I can hear it when we hear the scope of what you're saying is, what don't we do? We really do everything. People don't realize IBM's one of the biggest design companies in the world, let alone all the IT, and infrastructure, and AI, and research, and quantum, and all of the other things that maybe people know more about. There's really so much going on and it's full spectrum for everything related to a client account.

Kris: Totally. And I think our top clients appreciate that they can come to us and help them solve lots of problems, not just a problem. We don't have just point solutions, but we have things that can help them from business automation to IT automation and operations to security, and data, and AI. And when all those things come together, there's just such a powerful suite of products that we have that helps them solve really complicated problems that they're just not everyday things that people get to put their hands on.

Joe Sepi: And I didn't think about this when we were talking about it earlier, but do you do the whole spectrum design and all that stuff?

Kris: We have roughly, I don't know, 200 plus designers inside the organization that are true designers. And they help facilitate and help our customers think through the problem statement. So we do that. We have hands- on technical developers. We have solution architects. We have data scientists. We have security experts. We have DevOps experts. So we cover the full spectrum of resources that if you were to drop them in to any client, they could pretty much help them figure out almost all of the things that surround our technology and work through those hands- on, shoulder- to- shoulder doing pair development and coding, which is cool.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, it's very cool. Very cool. And I know that we have Cloud Paks, and operators and the Red Hat Marketplace, I have to assume that all fits into the work that you're doing as well.

Kris: Yeah. And I mean, as you know, the platform of OCP is extensible. So the idea that it's like a tiered cake, and so the first thing we do with most of our clients is help them instantiate the OCP platform. And once we have done that, then we can layer on, added to things like Cloud Pak for data or Cloud Pak for automation. And that's really where the magic comes in of our products, that is how we stack those on top of that. And they can take advantage of that, whether that be on- prem, on IBM cloud, on Amazon, on Azure. We scale out as well as in so they can manage that inside their infrastructure on- prem, but also in the hyperscalers of Amazon, and Google and Microsoft, which we become a partner of this type of ecosystem that we work with.

Luke: I think it might be worth unpacking for some of our listeners who aren't really familiar maybe with what hybrid cloud practically means. Maybe you could comment on it. I guess, maybe if I just seed the question, it would be that this is the reality we face. It's not like it's something that was maybe engineered or imposed. That's just how it is.

Kris: Right. So there are a lot of cloud native companies that can start their business in the cloud. And if you're a startup in San Francisco and you're going to go build the next Instagram, whatever, you're going to do that in a cloud- native world. However, a lot of our clients that we work with today have been around in business for hundreds of years and they're not cloud- native organizations. And they do have tech debt, they have legacy systems that have been on- prem for a very long time, running highly mission critical applications for them. And ripping those out and moving into the cloud overnight is not a trivial task. And not to mention that they're just core to the business. And so we see such a great opportunity for us to embrace our clients and meet them where they're at. That's a thing we say a lot is, you don't have to abandon your investment in your on- prem infrastructure to get the value of leveraging things and moving them to the cloud. There's an and statement there. It's not an or statement. And that we can help them by leveraging OCP as a platform that runs both on- prem and in the cloud. And it gives them this flexibility to move workloads from their on- prem environment out to Amazon, out to Azure and not feel lock in. And there's a fear I think in a lot of our client's minds that once we move to the cloud, we're locked in. That's not the world that we want to have them be in. We want to give them flexibility and freedom to choose cloud vendors, to choose on- prem because there's right places for certain things to run and wrong places for certain things to run. And it's good to have the flexibility and the freedom to be able to do that. And that's really what I think our product suite helps them do.

Joe Sepi: So I want to ask you something, and we didn't really talk about this in prep, we'll see how this goes, but I know it's only been six months or so, but have there been any projects that you've worked on that you've been really blown away by that was a real difficult task, or what have you, something that really sticks with you?

Kris: I think there's a bunch, but I also think that some of it is how we engage. So we were working with an insurance company in Canada and they came to us and asked us to help. And they were trying to solve some problems around how they look at insurance policies and give them the right rates to people, which is the problem that we can solve. And we did do that for them. Cool project. But the thing I think that made me giggle a little bit was, when the client said to us, " This is a really great use of our time. IBM used to take us golfing and this investment of time was way better than any golf game that we played. I mean, the time that we spent with your team hands- on into the technology was way more valuable to us than beers and golf." And I'm not discrediting beers and golf because who doesn't beers and golf? But this is a little bit of a different way for us to engage and I think that feedback to me made smile for a few days at least.

Luke: That's really interesting to hear especially because the whole reason that advocacy exists is exactly this scenario you're talking about it. When the world had a few enterprise vendors and you really were only going to choose from a handful, it was all about that high level sales. But the whole idea of advocacy and pre- sales engagements really is about making sure that you get that buy- in from the folks in the organization. They're going to have to use the tools, use the technology and do the work. And if you meet their needs and make their life easy, then your sales go through.

Kris: And I think the sales model as a whole is just changing so dramatically. The traditional relationship sale... Well, relationships are important... is being upended. And I think you see it everywhere. When I was at Amazon, it was the first time I saw it and I was like, " Wow." They hired a different DNA to go sell intentionally, it was by design. And there was a lot of thought on when we get people activated under the technology, it solved a lot of the problems. And I saw that at Google and I see it here now, the sales motion is really baked into how do we get value from investment of technology and services that will outweigh value of a relationship. And the relationship is important and I think we have great relationships with our clients, but it's really around showing up and helping deliver the outcome.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, absolutely. It's not about, like you said, going out for drinks. It's more about showing the value and being involved. We talk a lot about developers being decision makers and focusing on developer productivity and building things out, so I think that makes a lot of sense to just get in there and-

Kris: I mean, one of the things that we talk about today... I've been around for a very long time. There was a company called NCR a long time ago, which we had a relationship with, as you probably well know. And they sold cash registers on wagons and some guy bought that thing and said, " We're going to create territories and we're going to create quotas. And we're going to create this thing called President's Club for those that do a really good job. And when you do a bad job, we're going to fire you." And they would fire you. And when you left, they took your desk and threw it in the yard and they burned that. And all of those words are now embedded in the way that we talk about sales. And that's a long time ago. And so the model is changing the way that people think about quotas, and territories, and President's Club is fundamentally changing at a pretty rapid rate.

Luke: I love that story. We heard a story from one of our colleagues who did a little research when we did an event. So Thomas Watson was a typewriter salesman with a horse and buggy wagon. And one day apparently he went to the bar after celebrating a sale and he left his wagon unattended, and his typewriters got robbed. And that's why he had a no drinking at the office policy. He was really against it after his wagon got robbed.

Kris: I had no idea.

Luke: There's a lot of old stories. You remember that, Justin did that research, Joe?

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that's hilarious.

Luke: So Chris, your journey to get here... You started off in development. I would love to hear your origin story because having that foundation and understanding and empathy for those who are doing the work, say, at the client or within your own organization has helped you get where you are today. So I would love to hear your origin story.

Kris: Yeah, for sure. It's funny, a couple weeks ago I was asked to go talk to a bunch of high school kids that didn't have a distinct path on where they wanted to go. And so I went in there totally unprepared by the way, and said, "I have very few, if any, pretty much zero, prepared remarks. But I have an hour to talk and hopefully you guys listen to me." And I talked about the career journey and I think people think that careers start here, and that they end up here, and that there's a distinct, definitive line that goes up and to the right. And at the end of the day, you should retire and you're up and to the right. And I told them it's not really that how it works at all. The reality is, you go through these ebbs and flows of your career and it's the pivot points or the transitions that really drive where you take your career. And when I was an undergrad, I was an economics major and had nothing to do with technology. And I went and got my internship at some brokerage house which will remain nameless for the conversation. And they said, "Welcome to the team, Chris, for the summer. And here's your box of old leads, we want you to go in this dark room and call all day long." And I was dialing for dollars trying to sell life insurance. I'm like, " Sorry, this job sucks. I don't want to do this." And I had this mental meltdown, " Oh my god, what have I done with my career and my life? I spent three and a half years of college and I don't want to do this." And I then started to try to take as many technology classes as I could when I was in college and loaded up things as I could and started going to career fairs. And funny story, I went to a career fair and there was a company there called IBM. And I went to the thing and I said, " Here's my resume. I know it has nothing to do with Comp Sci or engineering. But I promise you, if you give me a chance, I'll work harder than everybody else." They did, they gave me a chance. So they gave me my first internship a long time ago, which I appreciate. It was pretty much the first door that I got opened, and I spent two years working for IBM as an intern in my post- graduate. And then it was early, they had a great onboarding program. I learned a ton, learned how to code software. And I did a quick stint in Europe for three years doing some outsource development, again learning more about how to code software. And then the transition point happened when the dotcom fell apart. I didn't realize what was going on, I was living in Europe. And they said, " We're closing the shop here and we're sending everybody back home." And thank God for severance packages. So much like you, Luke, I went to school and got my MBA. So I spent a few years doing that but wanted to get back into technology and went to work for a company called Level 3, which was at the early stages of its hyper- growth stage. I think about the trend in my career, I found these companies that were in this hyper- growth mode and they were buying companies left and right every couple of weeks, which was super fun because they were just growing like crazy. But then a gentleman walked in and he said to all the developers in the room, " Welcome, I'm really glad to be here. I'm the new VP of development. Unfortunately, you all should start thinking about what you want to do with your career because we're going to outsource all of our development to India." And I was like, "What am I going to do now? I got this job and thought it was going to be cool and now you guys are telling me I got to do something different." And so again, I took my resume, and I dusted it off, and I shopped it around to a bunch of people. And I realized I wanted to get into sales, which I had no experience in whatsoever. And I found my way in this guy's office and said, " Listen, I have no experience with this, but if you give me a chance, I promise I'll work harder than everybody else." And he did, he gave me a job. And we were selling dial- up. So AOL was their biggest customer and they had this digital dialer thing that they sold. And sold dial- up to AOL, which was a totally... It dates me a little bit, but I did that. And then I realized I was like, " This is great. The sales world's okay, but I want to get back to the selling technology." And I had been talking to this company called Borland Technology. I don't know if you remember who they're, the IDE company. And they were in this hyper- growth mode. And I somehow finagled my way in an interview with this guy and he gave me a chance, and I was a sales engineer. So it was like this breed between being a developer, being a sales guy, and this technical, which I thought was just a happy place to be. And I spent four years there and ended up being chief of staff for this guy that was the SAP of sales. Unbeknownst to myself, the company was probably not in its best financial shape. And here's a lesson learned to all the listeners out there, don't ride companies to the bottom. Get out. And since we had to do a bunch of stuff and the company then got acquired and I was like, " What am I going to do now?" And this friend of mine was the COO at company called VMware. They were the small 3, 000- person company, and I found myself in there. And that company went gangbusters and I built a bunch of cool teams there, built a team in India, built this team in North America. And then 2013, my phone rang from a guy that was previously at VMware and went to Amazon. And he said, " You should join this company called AWS." And the AWS as an org was maybe 3, 000 people, and it was super teensy. And again, crazy growth, like that place just hit the gas pedal and they went nuts. And then I had a similar opportunity with a friend of mine that was working at Google and he invited me over there. And at the end of my four years at Google, I was looking around what should I do next? And I was looking at startups and I was looking at a bunch of different things and I got a call to come take a look at joining the team to build this out. And it felt a little funny to have it come full circle from my days of being an intern, but it also felt really right. It felt super cool to like, " Hey, it's full circle." I had done a ton, I've learned a lot. I have the ability to learn more and I thought it was just a cool opportunity. That's my ride here, but super glad to be here.

Joe Sepi: That's amazing. That's a really great story. And I wonder those pivot points for you, do you notice anything common? Were you just paying attention and saw one going down and got an opportunity, came around? It seemed like it was repeating? Is there anything to take away from that?

Kris: Yeah, my wife says I'm a glutton for punishment and I like to join companies... Like when you're in an organization for a while, you can stabilize the job. If you're going from zero to a 1, 000 people or 2, 000 people, you can stabilize at a point where it's like it becomes an operational role. And you can be very happy in those roles for a long time. I've never been an operational role type of person. I love the building. I love the, how do we get things to work and what's that model. That's always caused me to lift my head up every once in a while and look around. I don't know if I got a recipe, Joe. I think it's a little bit of dumb luck sometimes when you decide to make the move, and it could be a total disaster. But fortunately, it has not been a total disaster move from one place to another. And I just keep looking for fun things to do and it's just worked out.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, it sounds like it's worked out really well. I was actually just talking to one of my colleagues this morning about this sort of stuff. I have a very different story, but a lot of that same sort of I think being open to opportunities, and also kind of always planting seeds, and having the feelers out there, and making friends that cycle back around. And I think really the being open to opportunities a bit is really been important for me. And something comes up and you're like, " Oh, that actually sounds really great. And this other thing I'm doing is fizzling, so sure, let's go for it." And it's worked out.

Kris: For sure. And when things go really sideways, you've got to figure out how to get out. That's like, "Okay, we're going to outsource your jobs to India. Welcome." Or, " The dotcom fall happened, and this company's no longer going to be in business." Or, " We sold your company and you're going to have to go find a new job."

Joe Sepi: Yep, yep.

Luke: I like that quote, " Don't ride it to the bottom." I remember when I was in a startup, I was a co- founder, I was CTO, and that's actually how I got recruited into SoftLayer and IBM. But someone had told me, they were like, " It's better to fail in two years, Luke, than it is to fail in four years." Because it's tough, after you've made the Kool- Aid and drank the Kool- Aid, and you've created this cult around your startup, really to deprogram was very difficult. But looking back, I was like, " Yeah, I think it was better to leave early than it was to try to ride it to the bottom."

Kris: When we talked about the hiring criteria, I think I've fallen into that trap myself of the things that I think have helped me from place to place is technical depth, curiosity and just the hustle, like we've got to move fast. And sometimes it's your strength, sometimes it's a weakness, the hustle part of it, but you have to be able to balance the three of them. Then balance the outside ecosystem of your life and your family and all the other things that are important of to why we do these things called jobs. And if you can figure that balance out, it's a good ride.

Joe Sepi: It's interesting because I'm thinking about this and I don't know how to ask this in the right way, but you've ramped up in a huge way in the six months of 1200 people you said, and really hitting the ground running. Do you see more upward trajectory, more growth, more... Tell me more about the future in that regard.

Kris: I do see a lot of upward trajectory and growth for us as a company, and as an organization, and the inaudible. There's just a lot to do. I think that when we have a portfolio that's broad like ours and we have some great technology, we're seeing great momentum in our clients. We really are. The technology and the products, they like the way that we're coming to market. They like the execution model. So I think there's a lot of room for upward growth here, both inside our team and client engineering as well as the overall company. I'm just very bullish on where we're going.

Luke: Joe, maybe we should take a minute, do some housekeeping, talk about our podcast. And then when we come back we can maybe dig more into the details of how Chris is activating teams and making it happen.

Joe Sepi: inaudible.

Luke: So first of all, past shows and all current shows you can find at ibm.biz/ intheopen. Current show is always embedded at the top. Past shows will be below on that page as well as a link to the podcast version. So if you're not in front of a screen, or you want to be mowing your lawn, or doing something else, washing dishes... I don't know... walking your dog, you can listen to the podcast audio- only version, cleaned up a little bit, less pauses, ums, aws, buts, all of that. And if I say anything stupid, it's out. You won't find it in the podcast. You have to go to YouTube for that. We have other podcasts besides this show. This is our, I would call it our flagship show. It definitely is the best show, but we have other shows and we have other contributors. And we're expanding constantly. More shows on the horizon. I think there may even be a client engineering podcast on the horizon. We'll see. We'll see. I think there might be. And then developer. ibm. com, all kinds of content there. We got blogs, tutorials, patterns, code patterns, all kinds of things to help you in your journey. And Joe, this one's for you, all the open source. We got our IBM open source stories.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, there's a lot there. I encourage folks to check it out, the history and all the work that we're doing at Open Source, it's pretty awesome. It's my day job. Maybe-

Kris: Is it just your night job or your afternoon job?

Joe Sepi: That's my day job. My rock and roll is everything beyond that. That's maybe a good segue, what do you do-

Kris: That's a good question for you, Joe. I'm going to turn the tables on you, your favorite concert you've ever seen?

Joe Sepi: Oh, wow. That's a good question. A couple come to mind that I maybe can't talk about on the podcast. What's interesting is I have been a musician for a long time and a lot of my favorite concerts are my other friends playing in small clubs, and just having a good time, and small intimate venues where we just really can enjoy ourselves in each other's music. And that's kind of my favorite thing.

Kris: Nice.

Joe Sepi: What about you?

Kris: I saw Dead& Co last weekend at Wrigley Field, that was cool.

Joe Sepi: Wow.

Kris: I didn't know this, a friend of mine's cousin is married to Bob Weir and he gave us these killer tickets.

Joe Sepi: Wow.

Kris: It's like, " Your cousin's married to Bob Weir?" " Yeah, here you go." So that was fun. I think my favorite though, Halloween maybe 2003, Jane's Addiction, Denver.

Joe Sepi: Wow. Where did you say it was?

Kris: It was at the University of Colorado in Denver. It was crazy because they started on one side of the venue, and then it was like the intermission happened, and they just opened up on the other side of the venue. So those that were late, got front row seats. It was-

Joe Sepi: Wow, very cool. So I'll leave out some of the parts of it that I can't talk about, but one of my favorites was, I used to work at a radio station when I was in my last year of high school. And I would go set up for live broadcasts where the DJ would interview bands and stuff. And so it was a lot of times it was backstage. And we went to the first Lollapalooza at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center here in New York, and it was really cool. I set everything up, I'm just hanging out and the DJ's a really good guy and he's like, "I know this is all your music with Jane's Addiction, the first year, and a bunch of other great bands." He said, " You should just go and hang out, just go enjoy the concert", which was awesome. And I did. But what I forgot is that all of the people were going to come back and talk to him. So I missed meeting all of these bands, but I did get to go out and watch them from the lawn. It was pretty great.

Kris: That's awesome.

Luke: Now I want to go, but I'll make it quick.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, you, Luke.

Kris: All right, go ahead.

Luke: So it was a research trip when I was at the Blue Man Group. We went to see Roger Waters- The Wall at Madison Square Garden. It was really impressive. It was amazing. It was after how many years, 30 years or something, it's still just an amazing show.

Joe Sepi: Wow. Wow. Very cool. Very cool.

Kris: That's great.

Joe Sepi: What else?

Luke: I think it might be interesting to dig into the specifics. I know you're working at a strategy level, but then you're also having to build and implement teams. And I think getting some insight into how you actually do that and what are some of the mechanics of that would be really interesting.

Kris: Yeah. When I joined six months ago and we had, I don't know, roughly 50 managers at the time, and now we have 110 or something.

Luke: Wow.

Kris: And I realize we were really good at onboarding technical talent. We had a really good process, if you were a cloud engineer, to teach you about how the different products were, to touch the products. But we didn't have a good program for onboarding managers and leaders. And people don't quit companies, they quit their bosses. You probably know this. And I'm like, " We have a big gap here. And so years and years ago when I was at VMware, I was lucky enough to be asked to join this leadership development program. It was a year- long cohort they put together and I learned so much. I mean, I met a lot of great people. We had access to our SVPs and leaders in the organization, and it was just a cool program to be part of, like we were the next talent for the company. And I said, " We need to do something like that, similar." So we started a leadership development program roughly five months ago. We actually had our session today and we had 110 people from around the world on Webex this morning. But we've done a bunch of different things like how to manage early career professionals and we had our Chief People Officer come speak to us. And my hope for this organization, and this team, and the leadership team here is that they are the next leaders. I want them to be the next SVP of sales or the next GM for our product team, and that we're giving them the skills and the tools to do that. But I also hope that they become friends with each other and that they build the bond of, as you said a minute ago, Joe, your relationships will follow you forever as well as your reputation. And I hope that by building this leadership cohort, that they jive as a team, that they learn from each other, that they grow together. I found when you get teams that work really well together, they trust each other. I'll share a funny story about my time at Amazon, my first sales kickoff. My boss came to me and said, " Chris, your team runs around like a pack of dogs." And I'm like, " What do you mean by that?" He's like, " You see those people together everywhere. They're really tight with each other. They're at dinner together. They're at the bar together. They're at the happy hours together. I mean, it's awesome. I love it." And to get back to the point here is, when teams trust each other, the speed increases because they're not afraid to like that someone's going to steal their cheese, or throw them under the bus, or something. The basketball analogy there is the triangle offense. You guys basketball fans?

Joe Sepi: I'm a basketball fan, but I don't know what the triangle offense is.

Kris: This is from the early days of the bowls and that's why they were successful is, they had this thing called the triangle offense. And the premise of the rules is, you have to have intelligent players that are not selfish, that are not afraid to play each other's positions, and no one to pass the ball. And they're all driving to one goal. And if you have a team that has those capabilities built into them, they're not selfish. They trust each other. They're not afraid to step on each other every once in a while. They step on each other like, " I'm getting into your space, it's okay. We're on the same team, we're doing the same thing, and we can play each other's positions, but that's okay." There should be swim lanes that people should stay in, and there's also this time that crossing the swim lane to help each other and to get things done with speed is super important as well. And when you can build teams that have those things built into them, it becomes pretty cool to see in how they operate at just a high level. And they get things done and they like each other.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. And I think trust is really important too. I mean, like you said, the fear as well, I can think back to different teams that it was on and it went well when we had a lot of trust, and we respected each other, and knew that we had each other's backs. And the times when we didn't were the times that things didn't go as well. I think it's really key.

Kris: It's the same thing with the leadership team too, like as I said, the people leave bosses, not companies. And I believe that so much, if we can create this culture here of great leaders that people want to work for, we have a much better chance of protecting great talent and keeping great talent. There's such a draw for good technical talent in the world right now, and if they're happy and they're challenged with good work and cool work, they will stay around and grow, and become great leaders and great contributors to the organization.

Luke: I think there's a parallel to what we were talking about with advocacy, and pre- sales, and engaging the customer developers, and how we engage our clients these days, our employees, because it's the same thing. It's, people have so many options. They can go anywhere, especially if you're in tech, not a problem to get a job. And in order for companies to retain, you really do have to care about the quality of life, like you're saying, and what it means to be on that team. And I hear this from our top leadership here, which I really enjoy hearing it right from Irvin about, yes, we need employees to do the job that they need to do, but we have to have them be doing the job that they want to do in their career for them to be successful. And I love to hear that. We get that high level message, but then we start to build it down deeper and deeper. And I think we had that in New York, Joe. We were told that we had one of the best cultures around a city team at the time because that we hung out, we trusted each other, we were able to collaborate and help each other with our projects.

Kris: Another thing that we're focused on too and being sure that we get right is the onboarding process of just people into the company. And so there's an initiative inside of our team right now to revamp the first one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight weeks, nine weeks, whatever it is, to get people activated. And that I want a magical experience for people to onboard into the company. I mean, you don't want people after the first week feeling, " Oh, geez, what am I doing here?" You want them to be, " I need to call my mom, I need to call my best friend, I need to call my roommate from the dorms and tell them how great this place is." And so we are ensuring that we are getting that right and that when people come to the company, there's this sense of belonging. I want people to really feel like when they come to this team that they've made the best choice, that they belong, that they're cared for, that we have their best interest and intentions in mind. And that we're really here to help them become successful like inaudible my job is making them wildly successful. If I can make them wildly successful, they will do whatever it takes to make us successful as a company.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, it's interesting too to think about it in this kind of world that we live in now because when we were talking about going out together, and happy hour, and whatnot. But these days, especially diverse teams being spread all around and working remotely and everything, it's interesting to try and foster that. And I don't know what the solution is or the formula, but I wonder if it's having cultivated those types of people over the years. I find there's a lot of good interaction on Slack and in these sorts of meetings and stuff. And I don't know where I'm going with this, but I do feel like there is a way to develop comradery and meaningful interactions even from a remote standpoint.

Kris: It's tough. I mean, the whole onboarding people into a virtual world... I mean, there's no great substitute for the face- to- face, again, the feeling of the company and of the team. But I mean we are doing a pretty good job of making that work for people, that they feel included, inclusive, and that there's an acceptance of who they are and who want to be. And I think about when I joined my team, my boss said to me, " You'll know you're successful when other teams start to steal your people." And by design, we have always felt and thought that our team will be a feeder system for other parts of the company. I would love for people to go from client engineering to the engineering world, or to a digital sales role, or to a external sales role, or a marketing team. The thing that's amazed me most in my short tenure here of those that have been here for a long time is how many jobs that they've had inside the company. And the fact that you can have a career inside of an organization that spans from sales, the marketing, the finance, and do lots of different things inside one company where it feels like you didn't have to leave the building to get a different opportunity to do something different. So I think about that as a success criteria for us of, in two years, I hope people are stealing our people.

Joe Sepi: And I think as you're talking about that, I was thinking about it too, it's not even just people. That's great, and I hope that you do cultivate folks, and they permeate through the rest of the company. But I think also just the way you work, and systems, and processes. I was thinking about it in terms of the work that I do in open source, a lot of it is remote and using the tools that we have to communicate effectively. And I try to take some of those things that I learned in that community and bring it to work like, " Here's how we do it. This works really well when you're dealing with the people all over the world working on one problem together." So I think that's important to a feeder system for what works well in these sorts of situations too.

Kris: For sure.

Luke: How's my audio, am I still having a feedback issue?

Joe Sepi: No, you sound good.

Luke: Okay.

Kris: Did you adjust some of the mixer boards back there? Is that what you did?

Luke: That's what I did. I was...

Kris: I feel so out of place, I don't have any musical equipment. I don't have a cool mic.

Joe Sepi: It looks good though. I like your background.

Kris: Thanks, appreciate it.

Luke: That's what I said too. Something that came to mind from the last few moments you were talking, in my MBA course, I'm taking a course now on managing self and leading others. And one of the comparative papers we read was about Bobby Knight and Coach K, and they're just different styles. Now, I wasn't a basketball person, so I didn't know anything about this. People who know about basketball, you hear these names and you know exactly what these mean. But-

Kris: One throws lots of chairs and the other doesn't throw lots of chair, that's kind of...

Luke: Yeah. And I feel the modern methodology is a Coach K style where it's just you're saying, " You care about the individuals, what they're doing." And if you can change their motivation where you're figuring them out, helping them do the right thing for the right reason for the organization and for themselves, that's a much better methodology. And sometimes these characters exist, the Bobby Knight, the Steve Jobs, these folks who have that edge. And you can't deny that they're brilliant and get results. But if we're going to be training and we're going to be trying to scale a technique or a process, it's not their technique or process. It's going to be the more benevolent, caring Coach K style. And if you look at his stats in the end, he had the better stats.

Kris: Yeah, I can't agree with that more. It's the whole thing about trust, caring for your team, respecting the fact that they're people, like this is a job, this is not their life. We need to understand that things happen outside of work that cause people lots of different situations that we got to deal with. And we're here to support them and make this a great place to be. And fundamentally, our job as leaders in this organization is to help people develop and grow and build them into the next great leaders that we can. And I think this is such a cool place to be and at a time in this place in this organization, because there's a lot of that going on.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. Saw a good comment from somebody, one of our listeners, " Resolving serious incidents together, if you have a good process, that brings people together too." I agree. Great. So what excites you, Chris? What are you excited about these days?

Kris: I've been waiting for that question the whole time. I have notes prepared, like what excites me? What am I passionate about? I'm super excited about the trajectory of our team over the next few months. I mean, I feel like we just spend a lot of time hiring people. And when you hire that fast that many people, the onboarding process is not trivially. So we've spent a lot of time onboarding and enabling people to get them ready to roll. And it feels like the bus is full, so to speak, and that the teams are ready to hit the ground. And we're closing out a great quarter and looking forward to a Q4 of just strong activity from our team. I'm super excited about some of the talent that I've got to see inside the team. Whenever I get a chance to be out either with our clients directly or even internally through virtual meetings, getting to see some of the early career professionals get their moment, that's always such a special thing to see of first time in front of a client like that and big moment, big meeting. I remember being super freaked out about those things, and you can see and sense it. But that fear, anxiety, and tension creates great outcomes. So I think there's so much goodness coming in the next month's, years for this team. And I'm really excited about that.

Joe Sepi: That's great. And it's good to hear too, that sounds like you have... I know you did a lot of hiring, but you still have the space for people to grow, and show up, and have these moments where they can shine and push themselves and grow really.

Kris: The other part of that too, and I think that we built this into the culture is, it's okay to fail. And I think it takes a lot for people to openly accept that. One of my interview questions that I love to ask is, what is your most significant professional failure? And then the follow onto that is, and what did you learn from it? I mean, most importantly, what did you learn from it? And I think we've created that safe space here that people make mistakes. I mean, it happens, right? As long as people can own those and learn from them, we can move on from those. And that's a good piece of culture that we've embedded inside of our group too.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, mistakes happen. As long as you learn from them, you get past them.

Kris: Don't tell my 12- year- old that. I'm telling inaudible.

Joe Sepi: No. I'm actually telling my 12-year-old that all the time. I'm like, " Dude, it's okay. It's all right. We'll be fine. We'll forget about it in a week. No big deal."

Luke: Something else we discussed in our prep conversation that I just wanted to highlight here was... And I think it was around when you talked about liking to hire folks with hustle... this idea of skills versus qualities.

Kris: Yeah. And it's got a substitution for that. What is it called? KSQ, Knowledge, Skills, Qualities. And there was always this triangle that was talked to me a long time ago of, you can hire the knowledge and you can train the knowledge and the skills, but you can't train the qualities. And through that interview process that we look for is the qualities that come with people that we can build upon. If you've got the curiosity and you've got the drive and the momentum, we can teach you a lot of things. Like you want to learn about Red Hat, great. You want to learn about Cloud Pak for data or security, we can teach you that. We've got people that are smart on that stuff and we can fill in the gaps. I always think about it, if we'll go back to my cocktail analogy, when you make a drink, you put ice and you put some fluids in it. And the fluids fill the space between the ice. And we can fill in the gaps between the ice with lots of smart people, training, and onboarding techniques. But we've got to have a solid foundation to build upon. And that's the qualities. And I always look for that of, do you have the right things that will drive you and this team forward? And we can always build upon those.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, it's so true. And I'm really looking forward to see how all of this develops. And I know Luke was talking earlier about a client engineering podcast. I'm not sure if he was... Because he and I spitball all sorts of ideas all the time. But a producer's telling me that there is a client engineering podcast that's going to be happening maybe later this month or so. I hope that's true. And I definitely look forward to hearing more about all of this work and the progress.

Kris: I need a microphone, a cool one.

Joe Sepi: We'll get you one. We got a budget for that.

Kris: All right.

Joe Sepi: Cool, Chris. It's been really great. I think we're hitting the top of the hour here, but it's really been great chatting with you. I'm super excited about the work that you're doing and I can't wait to hear more.

Kris: Yeah. And thank you so much for giving me a little space just to talk here and meet both of you, it's been really fun, and for those who hear from us and what we're doing here inside of client engineering team. But thank you so much for the time, I appreciate it.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, thank you. And don't hesitate to reach out if you ever need anything. That's the nice thing about IBM, I feel like we're all working together and happy to help in any way.

Kris: For sure. All right, guys. Thank you.

Joe Sepi: Cool. Cheers.