By Peter High, published on Forbes
08/14/2017
As a gifted athlete who was also six feet and five inches tall, all Fortinet founder and CEO Ken Xie wanted to do was to become a professional volleyball player in his native China when he grew up. His parents who were academics at Tsinghua University had other plans for him: to get a PhD at Stanford University and then to return to China to become an academic like them. Xie’s life was transformed at Stanford, as he met fellow students who aspired to start businesses. He notes that the entrepreneurial culture was not something he had ever experienced growing up in China.
He started a company while he was a student to help small companies get online and do so securely. That company would become SIS. He founded a second company, NetScreen, which he would eventually sell to Juniper for $4 billion.
As Xie defines it, these two companies represented the first generation of network security. In 2000, he founded Fortinet to offer the next generation security platform. As the company has grown, it has evolved along with the threat landscape. Fortinet now boasts revenue in excess of $1 billion. In this interview, Xie describes his entrepreneurial path, the culture of innovation that he has fostered at Fortinet, the advantages of having started businesses with his brother Michael Xie, and a variety of other topics.
Peter High: Please describe Fortinet’s business.
Ken Xie: Fortinet was founded in 2000 with the goal of making an impactful change in the network security space. Fortinet is our third company in the same space. Our previous two companies, NetScreen and SIS, dealt with the first generation of network security. However, starting in 2000, this was no longer good enough. It is like air travel, where with the first generation, all you needed was a ticket to get on the airplane, but today, they x-ray your luggage. It is the same thing with the second generation of network security, we need to look inside the connection because most malware comes from permitted connections, whether it comes from the user, the partner, the customer, or from inside. That is how Fortinet started. Seventeen years later, we are nearly 5,000 people strong with over $1 billion in revenue, and growing quickly.
High: You work in a field where you must think proactively, but also where an element of reactiveness is necessary because you need to adapt as the threat landscape evolves. How do you and the company remain current?
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
7/31/2017
A retired four-star general, Stanley McChrystal is the former commander of US and International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) Afghanistan and the former commander of the nation’s premier military counter-terrorism force, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). He is best known for developing and implementing a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, and for creating a cohesive counter-terrorism organization that revolutionized the interagency operating culture. He will be the first to admit that his retirement did not transpire as planned, but the impact that he has had as a private citizen has also been profound.
In 2001, McChrystal founded the McChrystal Group, a consultancy that provides “innovative leadership solutions to American businesses in order to help them transform and succeed in challenging, dynamic environments,” as his site notes. In that role, he has spent considerable time with CEOs across the private sector, helping them understand that the changes he enacted in the military are quite similar to the changes necessary in the business world: silos need to be eliminated, information must flow more freely across the enterprise, ecosystems must be curated carefully and cared for, and companies must strive to innovate while remaining cognizant of an ever expanding threat landscape.
In 2013, McChrystal published his memoir, My Share of the Task, detailing his years in the military, and in 2015, he published Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, describing how the lessons of his military experience apply more broadly. Both books were New York Times bestsellers. He has also joined the boards of JetBlue and Navistar International.
McChrystal describes all of the above and more in this far ranging interview.
07/10/17
Eight years ago, Dave Evans asked Bill Burnett to lunch. Dave was a management consultant and lecturer at the University of California Berkeley, and a co-founder of Electronic Arts. Bill was and continues to be the Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford University. Evans had been teaching a class at Cal on vocation, and based on that experience, he thought that Burnett and he might be able to address a need in combination for the students in the Design Program. He thought that the fact that students in that program had a multi-disciplinary degree that they may have difficulty finding their first jobs. Evans notes, “I thought this was going to be a multi-part discussion and that I’d have to have a couple of meetings to sell Bill on this idea. Within 15 minutes, I had the deal done!”
Since then, Evans and Burnett have taught an open enrollment class at Stanford together, which has become one of the most popular electives at the university. The method has been the subject of two PhD theses and had demonstrated significant results in helping people design the life they want. The method is centered on the principles taught in the Product Design Program and the d.school at Stanford called “design thinking.” As the ideas grew in popularity, Evans and Burnett elected to memorialize many of the key insights and exercises in a book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, which has been a bestseller since its release in September of last year. They discuss many of the key themes herein.
Peter High: Bill, as the Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford, the Co-Director of the Stanford Life Design Lab, and the co-author of the book we are discussing, please provide an overview of the Design Program at Stanford, which is foundational to the work that the two of you have been doing.
Bill Burnett: Most people, when they hear the word design, think of graphic design or industrial design. That is commonly the way design is taught, but Stanford took a different tact. We have been teaching design as a human-centered practice, since 1957. A couple of big thinkers, John Arnold and Bob McKim put together what we call human-centered design, which is Engineering, plus Psychology and a little Anthropology to try to understand people well; and then leaning hard into the concepts of creativity and ideation. This is what we now call “design thinking,” which is an innovation methodology that relies on multiple sets of tools and focuses on human needs. It is a way of innovating in anything: a product, a service, or experiences. What we primarily do at Stanford is teach undergraduates and graduates how to be design thinkers. Then they go out into the world and work at all the big companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and IBM. Most of my work is around teaching our Engineering students how to be innovators, the Designing Your Life class popped up as a little side project. It has kind of gotten out of control.
High: Dave, I understand the genesis of the Designing Your Life class was about eight years ago and began with you taking Bill to lunch. That then led to the recently released book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived Joyful Life. What was the problem you hoped to solve or the opportunity that you recognized that led you to collaborate with Bill?
07/03/17
Ann Kono wears a lot of hats at Ares Management, the $1.2 billion alternative asset manager. She is a Partner and Chief Information and Risk Officer of the company, and she is a member of the Management Committee of Ares Management. She also serves as Vice President of Ares Dynamic Credit Allocation Fund, Inc. and CION Ares Diversified Credit Fund. She additionally serves as a member of the Ares Operations Management Group and the Ares Enterprise Risk Committee.
Kono’s ability to push to other areas beyond IT can be traced to her roots in Finance (she has a BA and an MBA both with Finance as the areas of focus), and in consulting, where she became passionate about solving difficult and varied problems for clients. Her financial acumen and customer focus have served her well in building an IT team that adds to both the top and bottom lines of the company. By having responsibility for innovation activities while also serving as the company’s first ever risk officer, she helps ensure the company balances both perspectives well.
During her more than ten years with Ares, she has helped usher in remarkable growth, moving the company an order of magnitude forward from a revenue perspective, and ensuring that technology remains modern, reliable, and flexible. She shares her perspectives on her journey, the many hats she wears, and more in this interview.
Peter High: Ann, you are a Partner, the Chief Information Officer, and the Chief Risk Officer at Ares Management. Please describe your responsibilities.
Ann Kono: My responsibilities have evolved over my last ten years at Ares. I started off managing technology and then quickly took over the investment operations functions. My risk responsibilities began about seven or eight years ago, when we developed an enterprise risk function during the financial crisis. We started with operational risk to create the business resilience that was needed for a large-scale multinational firm. Then, we added information risk, which encapsulates information security and cybersecurity. Finally, we added investment risk, which is core to our offering.
In the last three years, I have also taken on responsibility for what we call the “middle office,” which is the bridge between our investment professionals and our operations professionals. Within our industry, the role of the middle office is to enable the transition of assets between the two parties that are buying and selling transactions and assets within the marketplace.
My most recent set of responsibilities resulted from us brainstorming how to optimize high scale, high volume, operational processes. We developed a group called Global Shared Services. The first function within that is Accounts Payable. As we begin to talk, you will see how technology enables all the functions within this group and how we leverage technology to make these functions more efficient.
High: What is the rationale of having IT and risk together?
06/12/17
David Trone has been on a mission for quite some time. First, that mission took the form of entrepreneurship, then philanthropy, and finally politics. He learned entrepreneurship at the knee of his father, who developed a variety of businesses related to the family farm in Pennsylvania. Trone developed his own egg-centric venture as an undergrad at Furman University to help pay for college. He then developed his first beer-centric business while getting his MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and then launched Total Wine & More soon thereafter with his brother, Robert Trone.
25 years later, Total Wine & More has grown into the largest alcohol-specific retailer, with roughly $3 billion in revenue with 172 stores in 22 states. Trone emphasizes that the future is more about clicks than bricks, however, and the company is investing heavily in e-commerce and digital experience capabilities. The company is also doubling down on customer experience, providing wine, beer, and spirit education, virtual experiences with people behind beloved brands, and a chance to meet the makers in the company’s stores. An educated buyer is someone who is likely to pursue and enjoy higher ticket items.
Over the years, Total Wine & More and Trone more specifically have donated millions of dollars to charities, often in the communities in which the company operates. It is a form of doing well by doing good ala Adam Grant’s book “Give and Take – Why Helping Others Drives Our Success,” which Trone indicates was an influential book for him. As he has gotten more immersed in healthcare, education reform, and prison reform through his charitable work, his third mission was sparked a couple of years ago, as David campaigned for the Democratic nomination in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District, hoping to fix what he believes to be a broken government. Although his run was not successful, he believes his future remains in politics as much as in business and in philanthropy. He covers all the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Let’s start at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey. You started your first business during college at Furman University, having grown up on a farm, it was an egg business. Then, while getting your MBA, you started a beer business. Where did your entrepreneurial spirit come from?
David Trone: My entrepreneurial spirit came from my dad. He was a serial entrepreneur. He was involved in many different ventures including egg processing, egg marketing, hog finishing, a farm vacation business, a gas and grocery business, and a picnic business.
High: You are the co-founder and co-owner, with your brother Robert, of Total Wine & More. An organization that has 172 stores in 22 states, and has been around for over a quarter of a century. In both the short term and long term, what are some of the areas on your roadmap for continued growth?
Trone: Our strategy is bricks and clicks. Bricks is where we have been in the past, but the future has to be clicks. Right now, we continue to build across the country. We are focused on growth states like Texas and California and filling out traditional markets in places like Florida and Boston. At the same time, we realize that the evolution of retail in America is e-commerce. We are creating an e-commerce solution that will allow us to be omnichannel and agnostic. If does not matter if our customers want to shop in the store, pick up the products, or have them delivered, we have to do all three and do them seamlessly.
High: You have lived in Pennsylvania and Maryland, both have particularly restrictive laws with regard to the sale of adult beverages. How has that impacted the way you manage and expand your organization?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 5/22/17
Terry Bradwell is not only an executive at AARP, he is a member. He has risen from chief information officer to chief enterprise strategy and innovation officer at the $1.5 billion, Washington, DC based non-profit that advocates for Americans who are over 50. He notes that though he is 54 years old, he is not the same 54 that his father was, and, in turn, in a few years, a 54 year old at that time will have a different makeup than he does. This notion drives his ambition toward continuous innovation.
This orientation toward innovation began when Bradwell was the company’s chief information officer. Having spent time as a consultant in IBM’s Media and Entertainment practice, he developed a strong business acumen that meant that as he joined IT departments, he did not accept that the department should be relegated to a supporting role.
Bradwell established innovation labs for AARP while he was CIO, but through a series of conversations with AARP CEO Jo Ann Jenkins, he realized there was value in carving off his CIO duties, responsibilities that would go to his key deputy, Amy Doherty, the current AARP CIO. This allowed him to focus more on innovation. His time in IT helped foster relationships across the entire enterprise, and a cognizance of the strategic needs of each. His impact on innovation and strategy made is move beyond CIO logical.
Peter High: Terry, you are the Chief Enterprise Strategy and Innovation Officer at AARP, quite an interesting title. Could you unwind that and provide an overview of your purview?
Terry Bradwell: Providing some context will help explain my role. AARP is arguably the leading voice of and advocate for the 50-plus population. Our purpose is to empower this population to live their best lives. AARP started out as an innovative organization almost 60 years ago, and has continued along that path. The 50-plus population has continued to evolve; I am 54 years old now, but I am not the same 54 year old that my father was, and a few years from now a 54 year old will not be the same 54 year old that I am today. This evolution means that AARP has to innovate to stay relevant and to be able to continue to drive our social mission and advocacy. We are a social mission organization, but it takes revenue to power that.
My role as chief enterprise strategy and innovation officer is to address opportunities and risk for the organization. From a strategy perspective, I am responsible for the creation of a multiyear plan that encompasses our opportunities, threats, and risks. It is my responsibility to develop a strategy that is outcome-focused that the organization can rally around, but is also flexible enough to change as the conditions on the ground change. We use innovation as a primary lever to deliver outcomes that ensure that we strengthen our value proposition for the people who we serve. We are a strong organization, and our strategy aims to keep AARP that way by addressing potential long-term relevancy and revenue risks.
When they are doing well and feeling secure, many companies become complacent. We are fortunate to have a dynamic CEO who recognizes that simply being in a successful position creates a risk. At AARP, we double down and push twice as hard when we are comfortable. That is why my function was created. At the highest level, I am responsible for shaping a strategy that ensures the outcome is a strengthened value proposition through innovation.
High: Innovation can be hard to define. Can you define innovation for AARP and how you measure progress?
Bradwell: At AARP, innovation is strategy-driven and focused in areas that we call health, wealth, and self; these are health security, financial resilience, and personal fulfillment. Let me provide a few examples. In the financial resilience zone, we looked at the trends and recognized that work and jobs are a huge concern for the 50-plus population because jobs are being transformed due to disruption and new categories of jobs created by the sharing and gig economies. Gone are the days when you worked 20 or 30 years for a company and had a pension and a retirement package. We are exploring these trends and innovating around financial resilience. With health security, we are innovating around a huge area within caregiving; which includes bringing products, services, content, and information to individuals who have caregiving challenges. We know from our insights and data that caregiving is a growing challenge. Over the next five to 10 years, there will be 117 million people in this country that will need some form of care, but only about 43 million unpaid caregivers available to provide that care. Likewise, there are only about 4 million paid caregivers. We are innovating around these caregiving shortages and other trends.
High: You run AARP’s innovation lab. Please share examples of the motivations behind setting up the lab, how it was developed and set up, and its place within the larger organization.
By Peter High, published on Forbes 5/15/17
There is a common misconception that Airbnb has disrupted the major hospitality companies in a comparable fashion to the disruption that Uber has wrought upon the taxi industry. In fact, last year was a record year for multiple of the major players. Marriott International earned $17 billion in revenue, and 30 percent of that was earned through digital channels according to the company’s senior vice president of Digital, George Corbin.
Corbin has been a digital leader at Marriott for nearly 15 years, which is to say longer than the term “digital” has been in vogue. As such, he has a lot to say about the so-called disadvantages of the digital immigrant companies relative to their digital native counterparts. Corbin notes that “different operating realities require different operating models and mindsets to enable both the core legacy business and the digital subsidiary to succeed.” Few companies have succeeded as Marriott has in this transformation.
Much of the innovation that has been the focus of Corbin’s recent efforts center around re-thinking the customer experience from searching for a hotel room, to booking, to the period before the stay, through and then after the stay itself. That customer journey is being re-thought with digital channels enhancing each step, as he describes in detail herein. Corbin also offers advice on what sets apart successful chief digital officers from their average to middling counterparts.
Peter High: George, can you describe your purview as the Senior Vice President of Digital at Marriott?
George Corbin: Digital has grown to be a major part of Marriott’s business. Our digital channels, Marriott.com and Marriott Mobile, now make up about 30 percent of the company’s gross revenue. This substantial growth represents a huge shift in the customer and how they buy, and in the business overall. Marriott.com, Marriott mobile, all aspects of the digital component of the customer booking experience, and the parts of a guest’s stay that digital powers, all fall under my umbrella.
High: Digital has grown to be a major part of Marriott’s business. Our digital channels, Marriott.com and Marriott Mobile, now make up about 30 percent of the company’s gross revenue. This substantial growth represents a huge shift in the customer and how they buy, and in the business overall. Marriott.com, Marriott mobile, all aspects of the digital component of the customer booking experience, and the parts of a guest’s stay that digital powers, all fall under my umbrella.
Corbin: We are. Last year our gross revenue via our digital channels, not third party, was over $13 billion gross. It is a material number. For comparison purposes, it is not far behind what Walmart.com does. It often surprises people to find out that we are a big player among consumer facing sites.
High: In our past conversations, I have found your thoughts about the challenges that incumbent companies face as they head toward digital intriguing. In particular, the idea that in some ways companies are operating two businesses in different places on the maturity, or S-curve. Whereas some of the rising digital native organizations only have to deal with the realities of being lower on the S-curve. Please describe some of these challenges and the ways that you have managed through them.
By Peter High, published on Forbes 4/24/17
NetApp is in the throes of a major transformation from a data storage company to a data management company. The implications are profound, and the company’s chief information officer Bill Miller is at the center of a lot of the change. As the CIO of a company that serves many IT departments, he and his team have multiple programs that impact and influence product and service design, from being customer one to running the NetApp-on-NetApp program to helping evolve what the company refers to as the Data Fabric, which is a set of solutions that allow NetApp’s customers “to gracefully, securely, intelligently, and quickly move information across their on-prem and off-prem environments,” as Miller notes in our interview. His IT team tests the new utilities and provides feedback on NetApp’s tools and partner solutions. Miller also notes that his team operates as a bit of a talent factory for the product development organization, for as his team develops insights into the product, some of them are logical candidates to fill needs of that team, either temporarily or permanently.
Peter High: For the past six months, you have been the senior vice president and chief information officer at NetApp. What is in purview of your role?
Bill Miller: I was attracted to this position because it provides me with the opportunity to contribute at the strategic level as NetApp continues to evolve. The reshaping involves functional organizations such as information technology, as well as product lines, product offerings, and how we offer solutions to our customers.
I play two integral roles as the CIO of NetApp. First, I am helping to retool the business as we move toward more cloud offerings and software enabled solutions around data. While the first 24 years of the company were focused on data storage, we are shifting to data management and helping our customers do more with their information. The opportunity to help transform the company and its systems, particularly in the go-to- market space and how we bring those solutions to our customers, appealed to me because it would not be business as usual as a CIO.
The second aspect of the position that intrigued me is that NetApp can utilize its own systems and run its own solutions in its own IT shop to leverage increased productivity, performance, uptime, and a variety of other desirable characteristics. NetApp shares these outcomes not only across the business, but also with customers.
High:Part of the retooling at NetApp includes the programs NetApp-on-NetApp and Customer-1. What role does your team play in these initiatives?
Miller: The two programs that you mentioned and a third that we are spinning up align with our core mission in IT. We relish our roles in all three. In the Customer-1 program, the IT team beta tests our solutions, our products, our software, and the workflows before we introduce them to our customers. The process starts when the Engineering and Product Development teams envision and develop new technologies. The IT team then deploys the product or solution in our hand-crafted, exquisite, global data centers using the latest technologies and NetApp platforms. We provide early feedback to the Product Development and Engineering organizations about how to tune and optimize the products and solutions. IT’s role with the Customer-1 program, however, is not only to be the pre-release customer, but also the early post-release customer. It is a valuable internal feedback loop that optimizes the products by utilizing the partnership, or handshake, that NetApp has between Engineering and IT, which is not the case in every organization.
The second initiative is NetApp-on-NetApp. We run our new products and capabilities in our own operations for a period of time and gather statistics and information such as uptime, availability, change control, and restoration processes. Then, we share what we have learned about best practices both within the company and with our customers through executive briefing visits, roadshows, and through collegial relationships with our peers. We enjoy it because while we are trying to sell a solution to our customers, we also bring information technology and real world experiences to the table which allow us to share the true flavor of what it takes to run the equipment, the platforms, and the software, as well as to discuss the benefits gained by running those solutions.
Our third initiative, the Data Fabric, has evolved from our shift toward becoming a high end, data management solutions company and away from our legacy as a superb storage company. The Data Fabric is a set of solutions that allow our customers to gracefully, securely, intelligently, and quickly move information across their on-prem and off-prem environments. The IT team’s role in this initiative is to test drive the new utilities and provide real time feedback on NetApp’s tools and partner solutions.
High: Are there organizational adaptations that are necessary for accomplishing these new initiatives and having IT more involved in the strategic planning process? Or, is success dependent on the culture and the expectation that this is part of everyone’s job?
by Peter High, published on Forbes
4-23-2017
Brad Stone has written multiple bestselling books that have chronicled leading technology companies and the leaders behind them. His book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon highlighted Amazon’s rise from online bookseller to a digital channel through which you can purchase almost anything. Along the way, he highlights Jeff Bezos role in setting a high- achieving though at times abrasive culture that has allowed the company to thrive for more than two decades even though it has reached a scale that might seem unwieldy.
Stone’s latest book is The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World. In the era of the unicorn (venture funded private companies with valuations over a billion dollars), Uber and Airbnb have captured the public’s imagination (as well as the ire of regulators) more than most. Stone highlights the remarkable similarities between the companies. They were founded within months of each other in San Francisco. Each faced long odds and tough competition, but through a combination of idealism and ruthlessness (an essential combination for start-ups to balance correctly according to Stone) emerged as leaders in their respective spaces. The story is also a fascinating account of the founders and leaders of each company, each of whom have molded the companies into their own images in many ways.
Stone finds fascinating stories to tell, but his telling is especially artful. These books are great primers for aspiring entrepreneurs as well as those who are simply interested in what makes entrepreneurs successful.
Peter High: Congratulations on a terrific book,The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World. Early in your book, you describe the process of getting Airbnb and Uber executives to speak on the record, which must have been difficult. Can you describe how you made both companies and their executives comfortable speaking with you for the book?
Brad Stone: Executives are rarely comfortable speaking on the record, particularly in secretive Silicon Valley companies. They are never excited about opening the kimono and talking about their companies’ history beyond the self-styled mythology they have created. I learned that with my book about Amazon a couple of years ago. The inevitability of the project is a large part of getting executives to speak on the record. You are asking for access, but the book will proceed regardless.
When I went to Uber and Airbnb for The Upstarts, the responses were characteristic of the organizations. Airbnb is a company with values around hospitality. They welcomed me in, they were nice hosts, and they expressed enthusiasm. I immediately sat down with Brian Chesky, their CEO, and ultimately the organization gave me quite a bit of access. Of course, they managed that heavily and tried, as all companies would, to shape their message aggressively. By and large, my Airbnb experience was smooth. Uber, on the other hand, is more of a combative company. After a couple of months of asking to pitch this project, Travis Kalanick went to dinner with me. He forcefully told me there was no way he would cooperate with a book right now. I had expected that, and I chipped away for another couple of months. Eventually, when Uber saw that I was proceeding with the book, and it was going to happen, Travis started cooperating and gave me a couple of interviews and access to members of the senior team. When you are facing a project like my book, it is smart and tactical for companies to share their perspective. In the cases of Uber and Airbnb, they both have plenty of critics, plenty of competitors, plenty of enemies, they need to aggressively share their story.
High: In The Upstarts, the differences between Chesky and Kalanick are stark. You write about how the shared experiences created a bond between the two and they would meet to discuss similar challenges and concerns. However, after their meetings, Chesky would go back to Airbnb and say, “We have to be tougher,” Kalanick would go back to his team and say, “We have to be nicer.” Given the accomplishments of both organizations in disrupting industries, what can you draw from the different cultures at each company, in terms of similarities and differences, and what importance do you give to those elements of their cultures?
Stone: Both companies rode the same fundamental wave of technology. They extended the digital world into the physical one. They marshaled the movement of people around cities; Airbnb putting people into homes, Uber putting people in their cars. They both ran headlong into city regulations, local politicians, unions, and pretty entrenched companies. Since the companies followed a similar path, they experienced similar challenges. They saw the opportunity to look at each other and learn from each other. To some extent, they were jealous of each other. Uber because Airbnb, for the first couple of years in most parts of the world, was able to fly under the radar of local regulators. That is no longer true, now we see pushback against Airbnb in many cities. For a while though, probably everywhere other than New York City, Airbnb almost got a free pass. Whereas Uber was in a fight from the beginning. Three months after it launched in San Francisco it got a cease and desist order. They had to battle and marshal their customers together to persuade regulators to change the law, or to clarify the law. Airbnb was impressed that Uber created a powerful force out of their customers, and they were able to use that to pressure lawmakers. Airbnb was never able to do that as successfully because half of their customers are out of town or traveling around the cities they are visiting. The other half, the host community members, will not always speak publicly because their actions may bend the law or alienate neighbors.
While the challenges faced by the two companies were similar, and they did learn from each other, their dispositions are different. Uber is an attack dog, which served it well –until somewhat recently. Airbnb puts a nice little shine on everything. They talk about the regulatory brand, wanting to be in the room with regulators and talk with them. They think if they are there, they will be liked. Uber does not care about being liked. In my book I describe how Travis would go into meetings with regulators and position his chair so his back was toward them.
High: You write about the number of companies that at one point competed right alongside Uber and Airbnb, but ultimately failed. In some cases these were companies that even beat Airbnb or Uber to the transformative or disruptive ideas. What are some of the differentiators that allowed Airbnb and Uber to succeed where others did not?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 2/27/17
Keith Collins has been with SAS Institute for most of the time it has been in existence. He rose through the ranks to be an early leader of research and development, and was a long time chief technology officer of the company. As such he became a leading influencer, not only at SAS, but more generally in the emerging field of what would be known later as big data and analytics. This was a field that SAS founder Jim Goodnight pioneered.
Across Collins’ time in SAS, he has taken on new responsibilities roughly every half decade. When he helped lead the search for a new chief information officer for the company a little less than four years ago, he realized that the challenges and opportunities present in that role would be an interesting step in his career journey. Since taking on those responsibilities, Collins has helped IT become a driver of revenue and efficiency-centric value, helped develop a mentality on his team of being “customer zero” to the company, and led a major shift to the cloud, all of which we cover in depth in this interview.
Peter High: Keith, you have been the Chief Information Officer at SAS for three and a half years, though you have been with the organization for thirty-three years. Before becoming CIO, you were the CTO, and you have run R&D within the organization. How did those roles color your experience as a CIO?
Keith Collins: I am of this new generation of CIO that comes from the line of business. My perspective is not understanding the business of IT. I came into it knowing the business of SAS. Running R&D has a strong technology bent, but it was about the business of SAS not running SAS from a technology standpoint.
High: There are a lot of CIOs and a lot of IT teams that have a distance from where value is created for the enterprise. One of the significant advantages you have from leading a line of business is that you were deeply enmeshed in the products that the organization offers. How have you oriented IT towards how the company develops value for its customers?
Collins: When I was CTO, we always wanted to make sure that we were first movers with SAS products. The CIO reported to me. When she retired, I interviewed CIO candidates. I have a habit of changing roles every four or five years. I started to realize that being CIO was something I had not done. I got a chance to hire myself and fire myself. It was a fantastic journey. I brought knowledge of our customers to the team, how to integrate the customer, and how to work with the different business units. What I bring to the team is that connection. What they bring is their expertise about bringing IT value to that connection.
High: The big challenge for a lot of IT organizations within companies where technology is the business, is finding some form of unique value that can be contributed. There is a joke that in a technology company, everyone believes they can do the CIO’s job better than he or she can. How do you think IT organizations within a technology company can contribute that unique value?
