HS054: Matching IT and Corporate Culture

 

1. The Spectrum of IT Cultures: IT cultures can range from conservative to cutting-edge. It’s crucial to know where your organization falls on this spectrum to make informed technology decisions.

2. Aligning Technology Choices: Make sure your technology choices align with your organization’s IT culture and business goals. The latest and greatest may not always be the best fit.

3. The Burger King Model and Zero Trust: Conservative organizations can benefit from learning from their peers’ experiences before deploying new technologies. Zero trust is an example of a leading-edge technology that requires a shift in thinking.

4. Levels of IT Culture Maturity: Aim to be proactive and anticipatory to stay ahead of emerging technologies. The role of the CIO in aligning IT culture with business goals is crucial.

5. Aligning with Your Organization: Understand and align yourself with your organization’s IT culture. Explore new technologies that align with your organization’s goals.

6. Promoting IT and Team-Building Strategies: Check out Moody’s Research for IT and team-building strategies. Visit Packet Pushers for technical podcasts on wireless and Kubernetes.

We value your feedback and suggestions for future episodes. Thank you for your support, and we’ll be back with another episode in a couple of weeks

 

Transcription

Johna (00:00:00) – Welcome to heavy strategy, where unanswered questions are a lot more interesting than unquestioned answers. And of course, asking the right questions is one of the most important things you can do. One of the questions we like to ask when we are sitting down and working with a new client is what is the IT culture? It’s a bit of a misnomer because we’re not asking about the culture of the IT organization. We’re asking what the organization’s attitude is towards technology generally. Let me just kind of frame out what we’re talking about and then we can talk about maybe why it’s important and why we do this. We say at one end of the spectrum it is viewed entirely as a cost center. The goal is to keep things running without a hitch, and technology is generally deployed 3 to 5 years, anywhere from 2 to 5 years really behind the curve. We’ve by the way, we’ve researched that and we find that those things do go in parallel. If you view it as a cost center, you typically deploy technology very, very late.

Johna (00:00:56) – We call that conservative. At the other end of the spectrum is leading edge or bleeding edge, where technology is viewed as a strategic advantage and a competitive differentiator. It’s deployed as soon as it’s remotely stable, usually three years ahead of peer organizations. And that, again, we call leading edge bleeding edge. And then in the middle you’ve got moderate and aggressive, which are sort of lesser versions of the the far extremes on the edges. So you have a spectrum that goes conservative, moderate, aggressive leading edge. And this is really an important characterization of IT organizations because it tells you something really key about how not only how technology is used, how it’s procured, but how to make the business case inside your organization for technology. And in that sense, it’s actually a spin off of the conversation that Greg and I had a little while back about evanescent versus enduring, because evanescent organizations are here today, gone tomorrow. They need to be ahead of the curve. They’re surfing the wave, so they’re likely to be aggressive or leading edge bleeding edge when it comes to deploying technology.

Johna (00:02:03) – Enduring cultures are the opposite. They’re more likely to be conservative or moderate. Deploying technology really mostly as a as a peripheral cost saving measure, not as a core business function. Does that make sense to you, Greg?

Greg (00:02:19) – I think so. I mean, it’s this idea that you should look at a project and decide, is this something that’s temporary? Two years, three years. I would put almost everything in the microservices bucket. So much of microservices is built to be now, now, now. But it’s not meant to sit there and rot away for three years or two years. So much of our monolithic infrastructure that we talk about, once it’s working, we don’t need to touch it. It just runs. We might not be getting the latest, greatest updates or features, but maybe we don’t need them. I’ve worked in banking institutions where, you know, maybe about 50% of their total software and business software ceased, you know, stopped being upgraded a decade, 15 years ago because it.

Johna (00:03:00) – Still works.

Greg (00:03:01) – Right? It’s absolutely it is inside the firewall perimeter. It is secured as much as it needs to be. The backups are solid. The technology is well understood. It’s delivering value and it doesn’t need to be updated just to keep it operating. So much of the microservices stuff is so fragile and unstable that unless you’re constantly updating it, it’s just going to fall over all the time. So you do need to sort of does that make sense? There’s a there’s a gap.

Johna (00:03:25) – But I would I would push back slightly that it’s not really a project by project. There’s an entire we call it a culture because there’s a whole matrix of envisioning. And usually when we ask IT professionals to characterize their IT culture and we explain what we just did, it’s a spectrum. Here’s what it means. They immediately can pinpoint where they are in the spectrum, but sometimes they hesitate and say, Well, most of the time we’re moderate, but for a few areas we’re aggressive, which is actually very, very common. And usually when we’re interviewing them, we will mark them down as moderate, make the note that some of it’s moderate leaning to aggressive versus moderate leaning to conservative, but essentially it’s not a project by project basis.

Johna (00:04:04) – It’s literally what the senior executives who are not in technology really think about technology. And I think, Greg, what you were getting at is there’s been a general shift of almost all companies, a sense that everyone ought to be on the aggressive leading edge side, which is, number one, practically impossible because everybody can’t be above average. Second, it’s not necessarily a great fit for all industries. Some industries are better off staying in the conservative, moderate side of the spectrum.

Greg (00:04:32) – Yeah, I think so. And I just it always comes down to what you read in the press and what you read on social media and everybody’s blathering on about the latest and greatest thing. And a lot of these people get paid to blather on about the evanescent stuff. I’ve got blockchain and it’s going to say it’s going to rule the world. We need to get into microservices and we need to do containers because we need to be making it happen at a much faster pace. The thing is, the faster the pace you move, the faster things break.

Greg (00:04:59) – You don’t want that. With long term, stable infrastructure. You want to have this idea that conservative can be good for some and maybe not so good for some other parts, you know?

Johna (00:05:09) – Although I do think there’s value in being able to pigeonhole your IT culture bucket ties it, as we call it, at a broad level. So and I think what you’re saying is part of it because there’s no right answer. That’s the problem. It’s it’s like I don’t know. It’s like everybody wants to be hip, right? Everyone wants to be cool and hip. And we’re on the aggressive to bleeding edge leading edge. But actually, that may not be a good fit for your industry. It may not be a good fit for your organization within your industry. Maybe that’s just not aligned with your business goals. So one of the reasons we ask about this is it really affects your strategy overall. It sounds like a simple subjective question, like how do you if an IT professional gives an answer, how do you even take that answer and make it meaningful? And interestingly, it’s meaningful in a lot of different dimensions.

Johna (00:05:57) – So for example, if you are trying to bring in a new technology for whatever reason, you had better understand what your core culture is, because if you’re at the conservative to moderate side, you want to make a case that this is streamlining operations. It’ll be cheaper to operate, it might be more reliable, it might be, you know, less maintenance, all of those good things. You want to be able to point to tangible benefits that align with lower cost and operational streamlining. If, on the other hand, you’re in an aggressive to leading edge culture, that may be important, but it’s going to be a lot more important to come in and talk about the capabilities that this technology is going to provide to you. So you don’t really want to do an ROI analysis on the aggressive to to leading edge side of the spectrum. Unless your ROI encompasses new capabilities and capturing new customers or serving serving existing customers differently. So that’s thing number one, that really depends on this, this characterization, this cultural characterization.

Johna (00:06:57) – I’ll stop and ask your thoughts there.

Greg (00:06:59) – Again, I don’t think there’s too much new ground here in the sense that this is always that tension between some things are permanent, some things are temporary. But then again, in enterprise, it all temporary things are permanent. Well, that’s true. Yeah. Like because at some point they just stop being meaningful and then people just run away. Moves on to the next hot thing. Oh, the reason our containers aren’t working is because the networking is wrong. So put a service mesh in and that actually makes it worse because the service mesh is unique to containers and it’s just another layer of complexity and it solves the container problem, but it doesn’t solve the integration problem with the network at large or the, you know, how do you connect different Kubernetes clusters together? And so then there’s this, you know, well.

Johna (00:07:41) – Yes, but no, because here’s here’s where I’m going to push back. You say that there’s not a lot of new ground. This single point when we go and interview folks turns out to be incredibly important in setting their architecture, strategy and roadmap going forward.

Johna (00:07:54) – Because if you know for an absolute fact that your organization is on the conservative or moderate side, you may not be putting in microservices anytime soon because you understand that. And so you make the decision not to go in that direction because it’s going to be too hard to sell. And the great benefits and agility and capability that you get aren’t what matter to your people. It’s a great filter for figuring out how to build a business case for technology and whether or not a particular technology actually fits. And in fact, one of the things we recommend is that if you as an organization are falling on the conservative to moderate side of the spectrum, don’t go out and deploy the latest and greatest. It doesn’t make sense for you. It doesn’t make sense for maybe your whole industry, but certainly for your organization.

Greg (00:08:39) – And when was the last time you made a house out of plastic? Right. You could technically make a house out of recycled plastic, but. Right. You could go out there and get recycled plastic and form it into sheets and build an exterior and then coat it with an appropriate compound so the sun doesn’t emanate damage and so on and so forth.

Greg (00:08:55) – But you don’t because it doesn’t make sense. You don’t have to build it to find out that that’s a dumb idea. Just just as if, by the way, you can just think it through. But, you know, but so if you but.

Johna (00:09:05) – I will actually push back on that as well because they are in fact making houses out of plastic using 3D printing, but for very specific uses. Yes. If you’re building temporary shelters for homeless people or you’re in in the wake of an emergency, that’s when you drop in a robot. Because MIT has actually demonstrated this. You drop in a robot, it creates a plastic house within a day. People have someplace primitive but useful to live in. But yes, you’re not going to be raising your 2.5 kids in three dogs for the next 25 years in that house. It’s not happening.

Greg (00:09:35) – No.

Johna (00:09:35) – So, again, it’s all to be fit for purpose.

Greg (00:09:38) – It’s meant to be roughly like a forest shelter that you build to get out of the rain because you’re stuck in the forest for one night.

Johna (00:09:44) – Exactly. Yeah. But again, so if you’re an IT professional, I would certainly urge you to think about in your organization where you fit on that spectrum because everything else then falls into place, you know, which how you position a new technology when you bring technology into the organization. And when I say when you bring technology into the organization, I always think about the Burger King model, which is hilarious and it still makes me laugh after all these years. So what Burger King does, what McDonald’s does is it does a ton of expensive research to figure out what street corners to put McDonald’s on. They look at traffic flow. They look at planned expansion. They look at the demographics, how old people are, how much they drive, how much they walk. They do tons and tons, millions of dollars of research. And then they plop in their McDonald’s. Burger King waits and puts the Burger King catty corner to the McDonald’s. And and to be completely honest, if you are conservative to moderate, you just want to take the Burger King model.

Johna (00:10:38) – You don’t have to figure anything out. Don’t waste your time evaluating new technology. Wait until your peers have deployed it. You know, the good, bad and the ugly. It’s all over the trade press. And then you can come and make your your case that it will reduce operational costs.

Greg (00:10:51) – And it’s not just best practice. It’s also well known practice. I designed this thing this way because that’s what everybody else does. You’re not right. You’re not reinventing any part of that wheel. You’re not advancing the state of the art. You’re not taking any risks, except maybe you’d be buying a quick the latest generation of hardware or software because you’re making the purchase now and you’re going to hatch it for the next 10 to 20 years. Not that that’s the case anymore, but you know, you get.

Johna (00:11:18) – Well, yeah, but that’s the that’s the general idea. Now I’ll push back slightly on that. You’re not taking any risks because everything has a risk is they always point out if you stayed on your couch wrapped in bubble wrap, you vastly increase your chances of dying from a heart attack because you’re immobile.

Greg (00:11:32) – It’s kind of kinky as well. I mean, you know, yeah.

Johna (00:11:35) – This is true, but let’s not go there. Oh, my God. You’re reminding me of the weird owl video, but never mind that the risk that you take is a risk that your institution, your organization has decided to take, which is somebody else, i.e. your competitor may get there faster and steal your customers by being more aggressive in deploying technology. And I would argue that risk is a little bit greater than it has been in the past because it’s not as safe anymore to be conservative to moderate because, you know, if somebody else comes out with a mobile app that allows them to switch from you to them or your, you know, the customers will switch from you to this this other provider of your same services because of the mobile app or because of some other digital transformation kind of thinking. Then you run that risk that doing the same thing you’ve always done is not going to get you the same results because the world has moved around you.

Johna (00:12:27) – We all know that. I think if the if the leaders of the company understand that, have absorbed it, have internalized it and still want to be conservative to moderate, that’s an acceptable risk, I would say.

Greg (00:12:39) – But this is very soft. Like we’re talking about what is arbitrarily not a science. You can’t put hard facts against this. This is why I disagree.

Johna (00:12:48) – I just think you can’t be I don’t think I can. I have done so when we we’ve been doing research for 20 years. You can quickly and easily determine which clusters of products, which architectures make sense based on the IT culture. And if we come in and are asked to come in as consultants to give advice, we can we give advice based on in part not totally. This is not the main thing that we look at, but it’s certainly one of the key things we look at. We can come in and say, this architecture is not going to work for you. You’ve got a headwind in trying to present it. The benefits are not aligned with your business benefits and everything is just not going to be a fit.

Johna (00:13:24) – Here’s what we recommend for you instead. Actually, you take a very soft, fluffy, subjective metric and you turn that into really hard quantitative spend these $5 million here and not there. Do Sd-wan and not Mpls. Oh no, you over here you do. You just re-up your Mpls contracts because Sd-wan is not for you for another three years, which is advice that we gave years ago. So it really does have concrete impacts and that’s kind of what I’m, what I’m hammering on. It’s what technologies you bring in when you bring them in, because Sd-wan may not have fit today, but a fit tomorrow. The business case you make and what you look at and what you measure to demonstrate that you actually did what you said you’d do it.

Greg (00:14:03) – You’re saying that with the appropriate approach and perhaps some advice from somebody who thinks that way, just because you can’t think that way of attaching dollar values, like I’m reading articles about how to create a formula, a mathematical it’s a very loose mathematical formula, by the way.

Greg (00:14:17) – It’s sort of whatever. But they’re setting up a mathematical premise, which is basically just some multiplication and subtraction to say if you’re going to move to the cloud, here is the 8 to 10 variables that you need to price out. And then if you put them into this formula loosely, you’ll come up with a with a factor that says off prem cloud is more expensive or cheaper than on prem cloud.

Johna (00:14:36) – Yeah. And again, that’s research we’ve done years ago. We did that back about six years ago. We have a lovely cost model for migrating to the cloud, which cloud factoring in all the stuff you never really thought about. Like, you know, the network connect cost of network connectivity within the cloud, the cost of storage within the cloud, the cost of network connectivity to the cloud. That’s actually what we do. We have a cost model that’s built out for that so that our clients can kind of plug it in. But I would say it’s not quite that.

Greg (00:15:02) – Disciplined.

Johna (00:15:02) – That yeah, it’s more for example, if you look at some of the zero trust products that are coming down the pike, supposedly everybody’s got to run out and deploy zero trust.

Johna (00:15:14) – But the reality is that the organizational I’m not really organizational, but the environmental upheaval that it brings is not something that everyone can get their arms around. And when I say environmental upheaval, I don’t want someone listening to this to run back and say, CC, I heard it on the podcast, Don’t deploy Zero Trust because it’s it’s an upheaval. It’s more you have to break out of the silos of your way of thinking. So instead of saying, Oh, I’m an identity person and we have an identity strategy and this is our identity strategy and somebody else says, well, we’re remote access and somebody else says, you know, we’re application controls. And somebody else says we’re cloud security. The reality is all of you will have to do things differently when zero trust enters the picture and you have to be ready to do that. Yeah, and some organizations just aren’t there. Just like we have our silos, we have our processes, we’re not ready to make that transition.

Greg (00:16:06) – Let’s let’s ask a question.

Greg (00:16:07) – If you’re implementing Zero Trust today, we talked about the four classifications here for culture, conservative, moderate, aggressive, leading edge. Would you say that Zero Trust is sort of in the leading edge today and aggressive or is it now or.

Johna (00:16:20) – It’s absolutely aggressive to leading edge In fact, one of the things that we we had done some recent research where we were looking at people who have already deployed it and they are almost universally about 75 to 80% in the aggressive to leading edge categories. And by the way, we use four buckets just to give people a little bit of flexibility because engineers tend to shy away from defining themselves at one end of the spectrum or the other. The majority always classify themselves as either moderate or aggressive as opposed to conservative or leading edge. But then when we do our analysis, we bucket it into two groups. And so it’s when I say conservative to moderate, we look at those together and aggressive to leading edge. We look at that also because you have to account for the fact that people are people are squeaky about saying I’m I’m an extreme you know everyone wants to think they’re a little bit normal.

Johna (00:17:08) – So so yeah, I would say zero trust the folks who have already deployed zero trust. Absolutely. Are overwhelmingly in the aggressive to leading edge side of the house.

Greg (00:17:18) – Let’s pick something that you would say is conservative. So it is a cost center company doesn’t want to spend money. They just want to have the minimum amount of it to get something done. What’s the technology that you think would fit that category.

Johna (00:17:29) – That Mpls? Mpls There is absolutely no reason to be running Mpls anymore, but in order to get rid of Mpls, you have to do wild and crazy things like replace it with that scary, scary public internet, which scares everybody because of security and reliability issues. Now if you go in and deploy Sd-wan, you can get rid of the reliability issues and if you deploy zero trust, you can get rid of the security issues. But those two together are a bridge too far for a lot of a lot of conservative to moderate companies.

Greg (00:17:59) – Moderate where it is mostly across center, but they see it as, you know, maybe it could accelerate some productivity just a little bit because computers are scary, but, you know, it could accelerate them a.

Johna (00:18:09) – Little. And the other point that I just want to bring up on this, because I think it’s important, we’ve talked about bringing in technology, making the business case for technology. There’s also like, what do you do with your day Now? There’s going to be some level of I just got to keep things operating across the board and whatever percentage of that of your day that is, that’s great. Let’s say you have 70% of your day is just keeping things running or doing incremental upgrades on things, whatever it is that you’re spending your day on. The other 30%, if you’re conservative to moderate, you should be spending that time thinking, thinking about how you can do what you already do faster, better, cheaper. Is there a way I can use four people instead of five? Is there a way that I can reduce the cost by minimizing the license license count over here?

Greg (00:18:52) – So could I automate a report, therefore saving, maybe saving some time, making people available for other work and increasing the speed at which information is presented to some part of the business, thereby improving the business.

Johna (00:19:04) – If you are aggressive to leading edge, you should be reviewing emerging technologies stuff that’s coming down the pike. You know, looking at analyst reports, talking to people like us to find out what’s new, what’s different, really push on the question of how is it going to change my business. And it really is kind of a an either or. Obviously, you can spend some time improving, improving operations and sometimes doing looking at emerging technology, but the bulk of your free bandwidth should be spent on one or the other based on what culture you have. So it really has a very practical impact on almost everything you do, both day to day and sort of strategically, tactically and strategically.

Greg (00:19:44) – I would say there that I’ve seen organizations that actually have an in-house team of developers not writing code or, you know, working on an internal application, but literally they’re to write Excel or to help with extracting reports. And those companies are. Where it is a strategic differentiator, where people in the organization will come and say, I’m doing this report, is there a better way? And a business analyst will look at it and then say, yes, and we’ll commit a development time to do that.

Greg (00:20:10) – It goes into a queue and gets managed and pushed out. That’s an aggressive use of it. To my mind, viable.

Johna (00:20:16) – I would say having having a I would say not exactly. No. And here’s why. Because this brings in another framework that we use, which is our maturity model. And our maturity model looks at basically classifies an organization according to four core levels unprepared, reactive, proactive and anticipatory. Unprepared is what it sounds like. You can’t cope. You’re an IT department that’s failing. Reactive is exactly what you said. They sit there in their little cubicles waiting for business to come in and say, Help me do something. And then they go do it. Proactive is they figure out that the business is probably going to want to do something and they do it. And anticipatory is that the business doesn’t know what it’s going to want, but it is looking out into the future and saying this is going to become important. So we’re going to, you know, in the in the Wayne Gretzky phrase, we’re going to go where the puck is going to be and have that solution built out for the business.

Johna (00:21:07) – You know, when they come knocking, generally your a reactive model is more associated with conservative or moderate organizations, not exclusively. Any one can be anywhere in those scales. But I would say an organization that three years ago sat down and started a center of excellence to look at how to deploy AI internally to to improve reporting. That would be an example of an aggressive to a leading edge company. Okay. Because business business wasn’t coming to them and saying, hey, can we use ChatGPT? They were monitoring the developments and saying this is going to become real soon ish. Yeah, let’s figure out how to manage it, govern it. All the problems that we know are arising and bubbling up with AI, Let’s figure that out.

Greg (00:21:49) – I’ve worked in companies where that’s exactly what happens. People from the teams know that they can go to it and say, I’ve got this and they can look at that and say, Yes, we could do that. It’s going to cost this much for this isn’t practical because of this reason.

Johna (00:22:02) – I’m sure you have, Greg, but that’s a reactive model. When business is coming and telling you what they need, you’re reacting to business. You’re it’s if you are sitting there talking to business and going away and saying, okay, what are the downstream implications that business is telling.

Greg (00:22:17) – That’s the next very different. Once you once you’ve built up a culture around knowing what the business does and this is one way to do it right. I would say to you that if if the if the business itself trusts you enough to keep bringing your problems to you, that is not reactive. That’s proactive because your your customers are proactively coming to you to say this is what happened.

Johna (00:22:35) – That is not how the model works, though Reactive is literally you’re looking if it is, is waiting for business to come to them. They’re reacting to an input from business. If they are going to business with a solution that actually meets business needs, they’re now into the proactive and anticipatory. So. Right. And yes, it’s true that you build on it.

Johna (00:22:54) – That part is absolutely true. That’s why it’s a maturity model. You go from unprepared to reactive to proactive to anticipatory, and you got to start somewhere.

Greg (00:23:02) – But I’ve also just seen that as a sign of good, healthy relations. So it is not in the Ivy Tower. It’s not so snowed under that it can’t embrace a new idea. The ability to then go back to the business and say, you know, if you’ve got time and resources, you can then reach out to the business. So there’s a new thing here that could make your life better. Are you interested? Yes.

Johna (00:23:21) – And that’s why that’s why it’s a maturity model. You start you know, you fix all the problems so you’re actually not broken. You move from unprepared to reactive, yay, You’ve gone up a level, then you go from reactive to proactive. Okay, excellent. And then you go from proactive. If you can make it to anticipatory, which is really understanding the implications of technology better than the business does and being empowered to take action on them so that you’re ready when the business is.

Greg (00:23:48) – It’s difficult to do. And all of this is difficult. Like, yes, most of this culture would be well established and defined. So if you come in as a CIO, you know you’re going to the executives are going to say, congratulations, we’ve hired you, we hired you because you are conservative, boring and tedious, and you accept that it is in a cost center and therefore needs to be trimmed. In a perfect world, we’d have no it whatsoever and it would cost us nothing, you know? And in fact, we wish all of our competitors that get rid of computers entirely so we didn’t have to have, you know, And.

Johna (00:24:18) – You kind of nailed a really important point here, which is once you have this framework for looking at things, you can suddenly realize, oh my gosh, what we have here is a culture clash, a literal culture clash. Sociologists developed this years ago, this term anthropologists excuse me, and it refers to literally how people from different cultures face things and how they internalize them and conceptualize them and contextualize them.

Johna (00:24:43) – And if you bring in a CIO and this does happen a lot, you bring in a CIO and you tell the board and you tell everyone, this CIO is super forward looking and it’s going to take us into the 21st century and is going to bring us to the forefront and the entire rest of the organization is. Still stuck in the conservative to moderate mindset. That’s going to be a fail that CIO will not necessarily succeed, in fact, as has a strong possibility of working there for a year or two and then just going somewhere else because it’s a culture clash. It’s just not a fit.

Greg (00:25:12) – I guess if we’re looking at this from a personal perspective, if you’re an aggressive person, but you take a job in a conservative culture, you probably you’re going to be miserable. You’re going to be for every chance, unless you’re looking to slow down, unless the pay is right and you want a holiday, you know, six months to a year holiday while working, you know.

Johna (00:25:29) – And vice versa. And you actually hit on another point that I don’t think we spend enough time looking at because I think people fundamentally have I don’t want to say traits, maybe tendencies, bents, you know, So some of us are always going to be more looking over the hill to the next new thing.

Johna (00:25:45) – And some of us are going to be, Hey, how can I optimize this thing I already have. And if you’re an optimizer, you may not want to take a job in an aggressive to meeting leading edge company and vice versa. Because if you’re constantly thinking of the new possibilities, you won’t be able to make the case for those new possibilities that, you know, as you said earlier, which I love, let’s make it invisible. If the computers go.

Greg (00:26:08) – Away and cost us nothing, let’s make the computers go away and go back to using Amazon rocks. Exactly. And pens on paper, because that worked. And we knew where we stood, damn it. And people came into the office. Yes, exactly. I say that you did. I had a lot of this was a billionaire. A billionaire who had invested in office blocks, was one of the largest owners of corporate office blocks in towns across various countries, mostly in America, is absolutely demanding that people get back to work because that is not the right way to do work.

Greg (00:26:44) – I laughed. What he’s actually concerned about, like, you know, is the.

Johna (00:26:47) – Fact I’m not making.

Greg (00:26:48) – Money. Yeah, I’m losing money. My billionaires billions are disappearing because people don’t want offices anymore.

Johna (00:26:54) – And one of the papers I read is The Washington Post, and they repeatedly run editorials that boil down to you. Government workers need to come back into the office because Washington needs your Washington, DC needs your revenue. Inevitably, every time they write this article, 570,000 people respond by saying, It’s not my job to keep the small businesses of Washington DC afloat. Yeah, figure something out.

Greg (00:27:18) – That’s right. I always I always read those articles and laugh because it always feels to me like the people who are in the office are devastated by that fact that half of the fast food outlets for lunch have gone. Yeah, yeah. Probably their first one, you know, like.

Johna (00:27:30) – Anyway, so basically wrapping it all up, I know you hate to wrap it up, but I would love for everyone who’s listening to this to start asking themselves the very simple question.

Johna (00:27:39) – If I had to categorize the organization where I work, would it be conservative, moderate, moderate, aggressive or leading edge bleeding edge? And if so, am I acting in sync with that organization’s unspoken goals and culture?

Greg (00:27:56) – You should also make a point of thinking about what sort of culture you want to work in. So we’ve given you a framework. Conservative, moderate, aggressive, leading edge, bleeding edge. You know, that is start up a company that is aggressively doing it. Typically, banking is someone who depends on banking, and so they see it as a differentiator moderate, which is companies who see it as being useful. But that’s not actually what they do at the core is away. And then of course, conservative, where you’ve got a bunch of grumpy old people in charge and they could wish that computers went away. The job is to keep the lights on at the lowest possible cost and you should align where you are in your life and what you expect from your career along those goals.

Greg (00:28:33) – So maybe the lesson to be learned here is how to fit in.

Johna (00:28:36) – How to align yourself with your with your organization. I will stress that the canonical example of a leading edge company is fidelity. I used to laugh because most startups will come and tell me we’ve got a product in Fidelity’s labs and I’m like, Yes, Fidelity has one of absolutely everything in their labs because that’s what they do. Yeah, they are looking, they are aggressive to leading. Edge.

Greg (00:28:59) – Working in those labs is hella good fun, by the way. Oh yeah. Because you get to play with all the toys. But the pressure to to find something is also significant. Be aware of that. Well, unfortunately, we have to wrap it up for today’s show. Thanks very much, Jonah. If people want to find more from you, they can head over to Dena Moody’s. Com, that is Moody’s Research, which is Jonah’s company, which is an adviser to many companies and corporations across the world on it and how to put their teams together.

Greg (00:29:23) – There’s a community there where you can jump in and if you want to contact Jonah, you can find all the details there at Moody’s. That’s ertz.com. And I’m Greg Ferro. You can find me at packet pushes net along with a range of other fine free technical podcast There’s loads of them including our latest and greatest the heavy wireless and Kubernetes unpacked which are becoming quite popular and I look like I’m on my way to being replaced. Isn’t that great? I could look forward to that. Joel Yeah.

Johna (00:29:48) – Okay. So you can be full time on heavy strategy, which doesn’t bother me in the slightest. That would be great haha.

Greg (00:29:55) – As always, don’t forget to send us your follow up packet pushes. It’s. Completely anonymous. We don’t quote you. We’ve been getting lots of follow up and we’re going to put together a few show shortly where we take those topics. The the really hot button was we did a show a while back about professionalization of of corporate of IT roles. And I think we’re going to have to do a follow up because it was actually something that we just hit tangentially in another show.

Greg (00:30:18) – And so now we probably do a whole deep dive on it because people have contacted us so much. We’re trying to give you what you want. And thanks very much for listening and we’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.