Tech Leadership During a Global Merger Ft. Brian Jones

Adam Kerpelman:

Hey everybody, it’s the Data Driven Marketer. I’m Adam.

Brian Jones:

I’m Brian.

Mark Richardson:

And I’m Mark.

Adam Kerpelman:

Thanks everybody for joining us, and thanks to our third host for actually showing up for the first time in a little while. Brian Jones.

Mark Richardson:

We got him.

Adam Kerpelman:

No, but sincerely, you’re the CTO of a company. You’ve had more important things to do for a period, there.

Brian Jones:

We’re figuring it out.

Adam Kerpelman:

We’re figuring it out. But had to bring you back for what I called on the calendar invite the State of the Basement. But I didn’t think about it past that, it was just a clever thing to call it.

Brian Jones:

Messy and full of toys.

Adam Kerpelman:

Messy and full of toys. For real.

Mark Richardson:

Too many cables.

Adam Kerpelman:

But no, let’s just, I guess start with, you were the CTO of Netwise, we were acquired by Dun & Bradstreet. That’s the whole mood. What have you been doing?

Brian Jones:

That’s the mood. I’ve been figuring out what new normal is. Like you said, our business Netwise, where we started this podcast was acquired six, seven months ago, now. Simultaneously with another company called Iota. Those two companies were merged. Day one, they started merging tech and product teams. So the teams I ran were merged, and I run tech across the whole org now. And then as time has gone on there, we have consumed more teams from within Dun & Bradstreet. So it’s essentially, we’re managing now, we’re all working in an environment that’s three companies merging together. Different pieces of three companies. And so it’s just, there’s tons of logistics right now.

So, I’ve been simultaneously trying to come, come up to speed with all the new technology that I’m working on and helping to manage and build and guide, and the strategies and structures and finances of two other companies. So, there’s a lot of chaos. I’m happy and I think it’s fair to say. No one would deny that, but a lot of opportunity for just total creativity right now. Which, when I get past some of the chaos that day to day stresses me out big time, it’s a whole different concept for me. It feels like a startup in the sense that we can do whatever we want to make things work and become one unit. But it also has this scale that you don’t have at the beginning of a startup. So, it’s interesting. It’s really fun in a lot of ways and really stressful in other ways. So, not going to hold back here.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. We were talking before you started recording about what your org chart looks like now. And it’s just like, “Hey, here’s 40 extra people.” My version of this has been way scaled down, in terms of the department I was in charge of. And you’re just like, “I got 40 people across time zones now.”

Brian Jones:

Yeah. It’s a real mish mash of structures.

Adam Kerpelman:

Chaos.

Mark Richardson:

Do you have to sleep in 15 minute increments, so you can make all your calls internationally?

Brian Jones:

I have totally upended my schedule and how I’m managing meetings three or four times now. To try to figure out how to work with so many different people in different time zones. And it’s ongoing. It’s an ongoing issue. And that’s a really interesting one, and one I’m… From a professional development sense, I’m really happy to be tackling that. As stressful as it is. Because I see it everywhere now. Everyone I’m talking to, like my peers outside of work who have similar jobs and work in tech, everyone is doing this. D&B has done this. The whole company is global. I’m never on a call that doesn’t have someone in another time zone. And I don’t think people give it enough appreciation. It’s really hard to collaborate effectively with people on the other side of the world. But it’s also beautiful, right? It’s engaging all these other cultures and all these other countries, it’s… Anyway, I’ll hold… We can chase that as a whole podcast episode.

Mark Richardson:

I mean, I have this idea of you like a… You know, that Black Mirror episode with the Uber man? You know, the guy who sleeps an hour. And then he just exercises, never eats.

Brian Jones:

I wish I was exercising.

Mark Richardson:

That’s my perception of you.

Brian Jones:

I’m not sleeping or eating, and not exercising.

Mark Richardson:

It’s all coding. All sprints, all the time. Right?

Brian Jones:

That’s great.

Adam Kerpelman:

So yeah, there’s a lot of strings to pull there that are super interesting. Because the thing that… It was a really interesting thing for me, I’ll say personally, to have… Before Netwise, I was down the rabbit hole, doing weird crypto things. All of that is global and all of it is decentralized and asynchronous. And there’s an in person component, but it’s inherently minimized. In part because of decentralization. And so what this looks like to me, is the pandemic accelerating the fact that we need to figure out ways to do this, that aren’t just regular standup meetings, face to face.

Brian Jones:

Oh, a hundred percent.

Adam Kerpelman:

Those have to happen for sure. But also, I can tell you from the other side of the fence, where they are effectively building the future of the internet without a bunch of rules that we follow.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

In corporate America, at least it gets weird. But, so anyway, the way it ties back to marketing though, is that’s what enables the multi-channel approach that we talk about. And then, if we’re honest here, we sell at Netwise. But the reason that’s relevant is, just the gap for me to Mark… I’m on the East Coast, he’s on the West Coast. That’s enough to substantially disrupt communication and coordination, and ultimately happiness for your team if you don’t change some stuff from the model that you used to follow in the office.

Brian Jones:

Big time. Yeah. So magnify that by 24 different time zones, or maybe there’s more than that. I don’t know. I’ve never actually seen how they break down. Maybe they’re fewer.

Mark Richardson:

You’ve got to self regulate how you… I’ve had to build in… You have to build in rest time, free time. Because I mean, if you’ve got people… You’re responding to people from London, you can easily let a Slack message that you receive over dinner consume your entire evening.

Brian Jones:

Totally.

Mark Richardson:

You know? So you have to build in those times where it’s like, “Yes, I know there are people notifying me, emailing me. But I need to set up a window of time where I’m optimized.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Mark Richardson:

Based on whatever sleep schedule you’ve established to be that full version of yourself.

Brian Jones:

Absolutely. I agree. It’s so easy to slip into that in the evening. And I do a lot of work Slack and email checking in the evenings and it’s silly. No one needs me to be doing that.

Adam Kerpelman:

Well, so I’m curious though, if it’s… Do you see quicker adoption of open source methodology for maintaining this stuff out of the developer community? Because it’s certainly where that ethos arose from, to begin with.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

Tools.

Brian Jones:

You mean internally right now? Within our teams?

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. Like is the utopian state of an engineering team, a decentralized engineering team, actually just a crypto decentralized engineering team? Or a GitHub? Everything’s GitHub comments. It’s commits and-

Brian Jones:

Maybe if you start the company and grow it from one person to 75 people or whatever. Not if you take three different companies and merge them.

Adam Kerpelman:

That’s fair.

Brian Jones:

It’s just, like I said earlier, it’s just a lot of chaos. So, I think there’s a ton of interest in engaging in discussing these problems. And what I’m seeing is that everybody has their own perspective on issues that they’re facing. And my job has been to identify what are the root causes that tie all those problems and perspectives together? And how do we address them? And it’s slow and steady is how you address them at the moment. We’ve got a lot of different initiatives that we’re trying. And I use terms like initiatives and communication strategies and organizational structures and tactical versus strategic. And I’m really wearing the suit well, I think, these days.

But I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve introduced ideas that the next day I’m like, “Shit, that was really stupid. I shouldn’t have said that to everyone or told everyone I was going to do that, because I’m definitely not doing that now.” And we’ve structured some teams where we’re looking at… Right now, we’re like, “Shoot, everything we thought we were doing with that team is not what we should be doing. Let’s rethink that.” So flexibility and agileness and patience with each other. So this is where it kind of feels like startup again to me, right? It’s the structure of a larger company, right? We’re 120, 100 to 150 people, depending on how you look at what our new org is. And we’re within a big, public company. But there’s all this opportunity right now in this transition to just get nutty with it.

Adam Kerpelman:

So, one of the things you and I have talked about a bunch… That this trends more toward the direction of communications, but the argument for marketing is that it informs authentic marketing comms, as well. So at the scale that you’re seeing in terms of your internal comms, day to day now, how effective is transparency? Just saying like, “Look, we wrote the whole plan down. The plan is here. Anyone can look at it anytime they want. Everyone, please read it.” I’m talking all 200 people on your team. Please read this. We’ll have a pizza party. Everyone will read this.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

Because that’s the kind of stuff that happens in crypto. People say like, “We laid out a manifesto,” and then everyone checks it out. I feel like I’m constantly writing briefs that I don’t think anyone looks at.

Brian Jones:

I think that’s-

Adam Kerpelman:

And I don’t know how to fix that.

Brian Jones:

I think that’s a glorious ideal. And exactly what I want head towards.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah.

Brian Jones:

There are too many established processes right now to be like, “Let me yank all of everyone else’s foundational norms away and say, this is the truth set.” And at the scale that I’m in, at least right now, I can’t even… I don’t even know what people’s day to day norms are. There’s still a whole bunch of people I’ve never spoken to, which is-

Adam Kerpelman:

Right.

Brian Jones:

… nags at me that I haven’t taken an hour to get to know every single person on my teams now. But there’s so many things going on. So, I personally love those philosophies. I think if we’re going to really run a global tech and product organization that is efficient and functional across all these time zones, across the complexity of our business and very relevant, because our business is global, right? We sell extremely explicitly into regions all over the world. Almost every country in the world, we’re affecting how sales and marketing is working. But if we’re going to run that, it’s got to be run differently than how a traditional old school business that’s 200 years old adapted itself to work in a global environment. Right?

Adam Kerpelman:

Here we go.

Brian Jones:

There’s new ways to do stuff, for sure.

Adam Kerpelman:

For sure. So, I don’t know if you meant to do this, but you caught up to the next post it. So yeah, let’s talk about D&B a little bit.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

We haven’t on the podcast yet. But it’s a crazy thing, getting eaten by a 180 year old company.

Brian Jones:

Yep. Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

You know, their bio says things like Abraham… Four US presidents worked as D&B assessors.

Brian Jones:

Yeah. I mean Dun & Bradstreet, I believe if you count all the subsidiaries, a rough… It’s a 10,000 person company. It’s global. It’s buying companies all the time. I don’t have a whole lot of experience inside big public companies. I started my career in one, but at an entry level position. So, I see a lot more here.

Adam Kerpelman:

They’re historically more of a risk. I mean, now it’s 50/50. I mean, it’s close to half and half.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

In terms of their business units.

Brian Jones:

Yep.

Adam Kerpelman:

But a lot of their business is in credit score.

Brian Jones:

Yeah. Abraham Lincoln was going door to door, right? To talk to businesses.

Adam Kerpelman:

Right. To assess the reputation of businesses-

Brian Jones:

Yeah, exactly. I think.

Adam Kerpelman:

… and say, “Yeah, we’ll lend them money. Here’s how risky we think it would be to lend them money.”

Brian Jones:

Yep. Yeah, yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

Talk about a forward looking thing. You know what they’re going to need is a reputation system.

Brian Jones:

Yeah, absolutely. Right? And imagine being the foundational company that established business to business credit risk in the 1800s. Extraordinarily progressive, right? That’s brilliant forward thinking. So, a lot of great roots at this company. Data driven and… Before there were technologies to think of data at like a holistic, massive, aggregate global scale, right? We had Abraham Lincoln gathering data, to then resell, right? This stuff’s not new.

Mark Richardson:

Who better to assess your reliability than honest Abe. Right?

Adam Kerpelman:

This stuff’s not good.

Brian Jones:

I wonder if he had his axe with him? Wait, was he an axe person?

Mark Richardson:

Oh yeah. He was a wood splitter.

Brian Jones:

That was Washington.

Mark Richardson:

Okay.

Adam Kerpelman:

That’s not a surprise that’s a road that would get you to president.

Brian Jones:

Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

Adam Kerpelman:

You’d end up being a trustworthy person around town, if you were the assessor and you were good at your job.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

Or whatever. There’s a term for what they were. Assessor is not the right word.

Mark Richardson:

Auditor?

Adam Kerpelman:

Doesn’t matter for the side of the business where we are, though.

Brian Jones:

Right. Right.

Adam Kerpelman:

Which is the marketing data side.

Brian Jones:

Sales and marketing solutions.

Adam Kerpelman:

Sales and marketing solutions.

Brian Jones:

S and MS.

Adam Kerpelman:

S and MS?

Brian Jones:

That’s gotten easier to say.

Mark Richardson:

Which is… S and MS.

Adam Kerpelman:

S and MS?

Mark Richardson:

And you don’t say SMS. I mean, I was chided. I was very much chided in Austin, at the Forrester summit when I said, “We’re on the SMS team.” And they made very sure to put that ampersand in there. They were like, “Mark. It’s and MS.”

Brian Jones:

I made that suggestion live in a meeting, that we just call it SMS. Got, nope.” It’s very hard to say. Wasn’t sure where the ampersand went for a while. Are we SM and S? S and MS?

Adam Kerpelman:

So actually, that conversation, maybe, gets to an interesting part of this. Which is, the reality of being consumed by a bigger company. I think most people can imagine it in a world where Shark Tank is on TV. Getting acquired is one of the two… When they say someone has had an exit from a company, that either means you went public or you sold it to somebody else.

Mark Richardson:

Both great outcomes.

Brian Jones:

And almost always sold it to someone else.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

And most of the time, yes, they’ve sold it to someone else. So, that part of it is just a constant thing that’s happening. It’s how a big company grows.

Brian Jones:

Yep.

Adam Kerpelman:

At the same time, it’s a tension that we all live inside of right now. Because what you were just talking about has been decided by a committee of people, a team that was like, “We got to save the and, because that’s part of how we communicate effectively. But we all have to…” So on some level I get it, it’s refined communication. On another, we’re coming from a startup where it’s just like, “Can we just make this change to culture, to be more efficient?” And four people go, “Sure.” And then it’s in place.

Mark Richardson:

Right. Oh, and now-

Adam Kerpelman:

And the problem for a big company is, well, they can’t stop being a 180 year old company. So, all of that process is still in place. So unless you go through what the company has gone through, which is a private equity takeover, and let’s be honest, what do they do in the time when they’re private? They hollow some stuff out and they try to clean up some other things, and then they go public again. You know? And so, I completely get the process. But I also get the thing that you’re bumping into which is, “You’re not supposed to say DNB, it turns out. You’re supposed to use the ampersand anytime that you’re typing.

Brian Jones:

D ampersand B?

Adam Kerpelman:

Or anytime you’re writing. Yes.

Brian Jones:

Oh, you’re not supposed to write the word and?

Mark Richardson:

Anytime you’re referring to the mothership.

Brian Jones:

That seems obvious.

Adam Kerpelman:

Even though the email address is DNB.

Brian Jones:

DNB. That took me a while to figure out.

Mark Richardson:

Because you can’t use an ampersand in an email.

Brian Jones:

I couldn’t log into my D&B account for a long time, because I kept putting in the ampersand. I didn’t read the email carefully enough to see there was an N in the domain.

Adam Kerpelman:

The ampersand branding choice is a SEO meta tag nightmare.

Brian Jones:

I’m sure. It doesn’t work most places, right? It’s a special character.

Mark Richardson:

I bet you anything-

Adam Kerpelman:

It doesn’t work. You can’t. It breaks code.

Brian Jones:

Engineering was not involved in that branding decision.

Adam Kerpelman:

No. Nope. Anyway.

Mark Richardson:

I would be curious to know what the discussions around the email extension… Does someone had to be saying, “No, we need to spell it all out. D-U-N A-N-D B-R-A-D-S-T-R-E-E-T.com.

Adam Kerpelman:

But look, again, that’s… We talk about it like snarky assholes in that moment. But it speaks to the digital marketing side of stuff. A thing that I learned really early through catastrophic failure of one of the things I was building, was that you can’t put certain things into a blog post title. It breaks parts of the current internet.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

It’s more or less fixed. But again, I don’t expect that perspective to have been involved in that conversation, regarding the branding thing, it’s just not-

Brian Jones:

And you got to think about the momentum, right-

Adam Kerpelman:

… how the world is right now. Yet.

Brian Jones:

… to change a domain name that all email works on, for Dun & Bradstreet. You’re talking years of effort, probably.

Adam Kerpelman:

No, that’ll never happen. The ampersand? Yeah, I know.

Brian Jones:

Seems simple.

Adam Kerpelman:

But-

Mark Richardson:

But it’s one of those things that sends you this false signal that makes you think you have a sense of security. I can type D-N-B, it’s no big deal. But when you’re a public company of this stature and reputation, they take those nomenclatures super seriously.

Brian Jones:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Mark Richardson:

And one thing that popped out to me, I wanted to kind of dial back. You mentioned a sense of chaos. And one thing you mentioned, finance. So, one thing that we hit with marketing in being absorbed into a larger, multinational public company is that there are processes that we are completely unfamiliar with as the talent brought over from a startup. You’d mentioned it’s four people to approve an expense, right? Or a vendor platform now has to go through 40 people.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Mark Richardson:

And that’s just the way of the world. That’s the way it is at lots of big companies. For us, it’s a bit of a speed bump in our marketing programs. Because rather than run a credit card, now we’re running invoicing through an accounts payable department that has a set of requisition requirements and business case needs. All of which, we have at the ready. But it’s the sense of speeding to market. And I wonder how many people of our listeners, if you’ve been acquired, if you’re in a department having to go through the same thing, having to check your ego and go, “Look, I know everybody’s on the same team. One team, one dream. It’s just I’ve never had to write this many requisitions or justifications for the money we want to spend. The ads we want to run.” So that’s something I was like, “Wow.”

Brian Jones:

Yeah, there’s a lot of process.

Mark Richardson:

This is a lot of process.

Adam Kerpelman:

Try to think of it as there’s security in the fact that someone else is going to check your thinking on any matter.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah.

Brian Jones:

Positive way to look at everything. For sure.

Adam Kerpelman:

But also, it for sure is… It’s a thing, right? I don’t think… I mean, we were just talking about this from the beginning.

Brian Jones:

I think, inherently, as you grow organizations and probably we can take this really to a philosophical level, as you grow organisms in our universe, the physics of it changes, right? Like if you look at heart rates in mammals, they get slower as you get bigger, right? There’s geometry mathematics that predicts system function in a mouse versus an elephant. And the same thing happens with companies, right? We’re organisms. We’re huge, incredibly complex things with thousands and thousands of minds trying to collaboratively do projects. And one of the things that comes from this experience with me, and this is at the root of a lot of this stuff is, I’m so anxious all the time. And I was this anxious before, at a small startup. And I did it there because I could do things so quickly. I was like, “Let’s get 25 purchases approved today and hire four people. And totally change our website. And change our branding. I don’t need any approval.”

And here it’s harder to do that, reasonably so, in a lot of senses. And I should calm the hell down and take advantage of the fact that I can act at a slower pace, and maybe take a little more time on things. And that’s not really true in some ways, right? We have promises we made to this company when they bought us and real reputations on the line, and people’s bonuses on the line, to hit metrics. And that’s where we get a lot of this frustration. But as we go into next year we can reassess how we live in a professional environment and take advantage of some of the perks of, if someone needs a purchase, it’s okay for it to take a couple weeks. I can relax about that. I don’t need to bug finance every day for 12 days to get something approved. Calm down, man.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah, but is engineering right there for it?

Brian Jones:

A little bit.

Adam Kerpelman:

The anxiety piece. The repetitive thought that I end up locked in around that, I think. It’s almost a trigger thing, where I’m just like, “I feel anxious. What’s the problem here?” And then I have a mantra that calms it down, which is largely just… It’s a different game. And it’s more like a community problem than it is a technology problem, in a lot of these cases. Because you literally are coordinating humans. And so, it’s going to move closer. What are the biggest versions of that you can imagine? They’re governments, right? So if you go back and recalibrate around expecting that things will probably take about as long as they take inside of a government, at 10,000 people, we have more people than some towns that have a city hall and make laws and stuff.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Mark Richardson:

Dude, just think about the DMV. You go to renew your driver’s license or your registration, you get a piece of paper. The first day, you don’t actually get the registration or the driver’s license. They have to mail that to you. You know what I mean? They print out a little inkjet card for you… Temporary, whatever. You know? And then the real thing comes three weeks later. You know? There’s built in latency, that I think coming from a startup, we are initially jarred by a lot of these processes.

Brian Jones:

There’s something about the conversation around this online and in culture and at startups and in the transition, where it feeds… Being upset and frustrated by the differences between a startup and a big company feed the same thing that culturally, we have a big problem with. Where it’s fun to complain about how fast I could do this thing at my startup. When really, you’re mostly being an idiot and a jerk when you do it.

Mark Richardson:

Yes.

Adam Kerpelman:

Right. Often succeeding in spite of yourself. Not because.

Brian Jones:

Totally. Totally.

Adam Kerpelman:

Which, we just sound old to the youngs right now. But whatever.

Brian Jones:

We’re in the middle. Okay? [inaudible 00:23:53] Right in the middle.

Adam Kerpelman:

But it also hitches into the bigger things, like capitalism. Part of it is just, there are public company compliance requirements. And, you know-

Mark Richardson:

As a lawyer, you have to take that seriously.

Adam Kerpelman:

So, as a lawyer, I appreciate that those are there for real reasons. To protect shareholders from malfeasance.

Brian Jones:

Right.

Adam Kerpelman:

I’m okay with that. I’m okay with the idea that slows the world down. And then if you want to go back to the philosophical thing you were talking about, sometimes you got to regulate heart rate if the organism is a certain size, for it to continue to survive. And one of the perks of being inside that is you can just chill.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Mark Richardson:

Deep breathing, reduce heart rate.

Adam Kerpelman:

But you’re right. At the same time, what they’re looking for is the innovation that drives change inside of an org. Right? And so I feel like it’s probably, if you track the life cycle of a company this old, it probably goes in cycles. You get big and fat and happy. And then you got to lean down and then pick up some people that want to shake up whatever’s happening. Like do stupid podcasts. It’s an interesting experience in that sense as well, right? You see how the… Like you said, the scaling is almost biological when you’re dealing with a community of humans trying to get stuff done together.

Brian Jones:

10,000 people is a lot. That’s a tiny stadium.

Adam Kerpelman:

I think a place to wrap up, maybe then, is you mentioned earlier when I said… I ran you through the normal guest questionnaire, and you said what you’re excited about is getting the tech and product leadership together, in person.

Mark Richardson:

Product. There was a-

Adam Kerpelman:

You want to talk, broadly, about just that cycle inside of hybrid… It’s an interesting topic of exploration for me, right? Because it’s part of the whole thing we just talked about. The happiness pie. The coordination pie. All that kind of stuff. On some level, at least for some level of strategy inside of the system, people still have to get together in a room with a whiteboard or whatever, and just talk stuff out. Well, what’s your experience of that? I haven’t had any offsites. So I’m not really… We’re getting to that, I think, on our team. But you’ve had a bunch of leadership meetings because you’re at a different level where it’s like, “Okay, we all have to get in a room now.”

Brian Jones:

Yeah. I’ve had a few… I’m calling them onsites, which I think is an update to the proper name. Because we’re all coming from offsite. It hasn’t caught on yet.

Mark Richardson:

Coin that. Coin it. Coin it here.

Brian Jones:

Onsites.

Mark Richardson:

Coin it now. Onsite.

Brian Jones:

But I think getting-

Adam Kerpelman:

No, it needs to be something better. Meme it up.

Brian Jones:

It can be more interesting.

Adam Kerpelman:

Galactic feast.

Brian Jones:

Galactic feast. That’s good.

I have been to a handful of those at different levels and across different teams within the business. And they’re great. People still like being together, right? You can do stuff pretty functionally remotely, now. Right? Netwise only got together a handful of times as a company in its 10 year history, and we were a very successful business. And it probably is more effective just for our own health, and all the abstract aspects of running a business that make it successful, that we get together in person. Moreso than any actual tactical or strategic thing you’re going to get done in a room together, just being together is great. There are relationships that I’m excited for people to evolve and to grow when we get together, because these people work together all the time.

And physically touching each other. We can shake hands again, right? In person? And that’s a huge deal. What an amazing thing, to be able to get to be in a room with all these people who… Otherwise, I would absolutely never run into people who live on the other side of the planet. So, there’s an excitement and an intrigue and an interest. And this’ll build the team building aspect. But I really mean this builds relationships. Even if we just got together and met for five minutes, it would have such a dramatic impact on how everything else goes. After some [inaudible 00:28:18]-

Mark Richardson:

It’s a big vote of confidence, too.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

So, here’s my follow up to that. Do you need to talk about work at the onsites?

Brian Jones:

No. Absolutely not.

Adam Kerpelman:

Should we just… Should it just be like-

Brian Jones:

You should.

Adam Kerpelman:

… “There’s budget for your team to do Knowles for two weeks,” or something. Or some equivalent experience that’s just like, do stuff that’s not work together, as team building-

Mark Richardson:

Escape room.

Adam Kerpelman:

… in person. And then-

Brian Jones:

Yeah. Happy to share my [inaudible 00:28:49].

Adam Kerpelman:

… go home.

Brian Jones:

My energy around saying yes right away, or agreeing that no, you don’t need to do work together. I believe that. However, I think the work provides the structure that’s really needed to build the right relationships. Right? If you don’t have the context of what you’re all doing together when you go back to work, just going and doing a surf trip together is something, right? You’ll get cliques and the wrong people will hang out. And you’ll build some friendships, which is also valuable. So there’d be great value there. But I think the structure of what the projects are is critical.

So I’m actually actively putting together slides, brief slides, just to have notes to make sure I say some things I want to say to our teams next week when we’re all together. And my number one goal is the non-work stuff. There’s a ton of work stuff we want to do and we put a ton of work into organizing that and structuring it, and putting together teams that are responsible for presentations. But even if we just kind of loosely touched on topics, and just casually discussed and there were no PowerPoints, I think that work sprinkling would give the structure that would build the relationships that then feed us later. So, I’m not stressed about accomplishing goals. It’s great if we get into deep white boarding and we’re drawing architectural diagrams and digging into each other’s software and stuff. But I don’t care. I don’t care if we do that.

Mark Richardson:

It’s almost like reinventing culture, right? Being in a remote environment, you almost have to reimagine what a workplace culture is. You don’t get to grab somebody and go out to In’N’Out for lunch-

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Mark Richardson:

… and shoot the shit about-

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Mark Richardson:

… “Hey, what are you passionate about? What are you feeling? What are you feeling frustrated with? What can I help with?” Or even just-

Brian Jones:

Totally agree.

Mark Richardson:

… what’s going on in your life. Like, “Let’s talk about the Lakers game.” You know, things like that, it feels… Bandwidth is so valuable to each of these remote participants, I feel that you almost feel a pressure to the only focus on the work. When I think the softer cultural interactions, I think, are so essential to keeping a vibrant team. Yeah.

Brian Jones:

Yeah, that pressure is a good thing to pay attention to. Because it is easy to only have that pressure, when you’re remote. It’s like, “No, I’m working. I don’t have a friend at work that I dig out to distract myself with sometimes during the day. I’m all business.” Which isn’t quite healthy either. But I think when we look at traditional business structures and in office work, and people talk about culture and what they miss and what we need with the human contact, a lot of people lean on friends at work and stuff. And that’s nice, but I don’t think that’s actually mostly what’s going on. You might have a few friends at work, but you’re not going to be friends with 10,000 people. And you’re not going to be friends with all 25 people that are on your team, or all hundred people that you work with day to day.

So, I don’t think that’s a huge part of what’s going on. I think it really is the really subtle… It’s like the… One of the things I’m expecting coming away from an onsite with this team, and it’s about 20 people that we’re getting together, is I think just there’s something that will click in my brain that says, “This is a real person. I was physically with them. I experienced the presence of their body. And they weren’t just a thing I was watching on the internet.” Right? And I think that will… All that, in and of itself, I expect to click for a lot of people. And not in a conscious way. It’ll just be a presence like, “I was there with another creature. And they have thoughts and needs and personalities. And they get upset if I say something crappy to them and they feel good when I compliment them.” Right? We’ll experience that. And that’s what I want out of this, mostly. More than anything else, I think.

Adam Kerpelman:

Well, and so I think that’s important for the in-person, in-person part.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

But the place to wrap this up on a podcast that is meant to be community driven, in the end. It’s like, “How do you virtualize, to some extent, some version of that?”

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

Because that’s a thing that I feel lacking. You and I have talked about this in terms of Netwise and how to try to figure it out. And I’ve not bumped into any solutions inside a D&B that make me feel like, “Oh, they have it cracked,” either. But there’s no equivalent of a pub. There’s no… In the crypto decentralized discord projects, they have a tavern. And the people just hang out in the tavern and they shoot the shit. And that happens a little in Slack, but you can still tell that people are sort of reserved on that platform. We do need more book clubs or more…

Mark Richardson:

Yeah. I mean, it’s-

Adam Kerpelman:

Or I mean, I have Post-Its on my desk, say things like learning counts as work. And I try to do the lessons. But it’s not the same as attending a seminar with some people from work. And I’m not saying that you need to attend the seminar but you could have a virtual version of that.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

It’s a little more like, how do we account in our schedules for time that’s… It’s Thursday afternoon, we’re just going to have happy hour. Anybody can show up that wants to show up. And then that becomes a cultural norm that’s helpful. Thus far, my efforts to launch anything like that have fallen flat. Which says to me people don’t care. But I don’t know if that’s because they need leadership to tell them it’s okay.

Mark Richardson:

Well, I mean, they’re also bought into their own, I think, routine and productivity flywheel of, “If I don’t produce enough impressive things, enough impressive outcomes, enough responded emails, enough deliverables, then somehow I’m letting the team down.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Mark Richardson:

I think there’s almost an enforced pressure to not gas off a little bit. Even as much as gassing off is necessary.

Adam Kerpelman:

Then we’re back to incentive scores, right? We need to give out points for things, other than just capitalism-

Brian Jones:

Totally agree.

Adam Kerpelman:

Inside of this system.

Brian Jones:

I think this is also one of those issues that’s so big that it’s multi-generational. Right? We’re one of the weird generations, one of probably four or five, depending on how you want to categorize that, that will live through both here. That will have had office jobs and feared them, or loved them and had remote jobs and feared them or loved them. And this is not… I have so much baggage from how I was brought up and how school worked, and how classes worked and how jobs worked. And I can’t erase that. I could spend the rest of my life and I’ll still have those weights. And so, this is such a big transition that I think some hybrid is… The real solution is hybrid is necessary, still. You cannot reproduce those things without physically getting together yet. And to do it, like you said, Kerp, we need real things. They need to be acted on as real business initiatives. They need to be led from the absolute top down. You need to be forced into the pub. Right? Just because we’re in a squishy transition phase, right?

Adam Kerpelman:

Somebody decides to build a cafeteria, at some point in the life of a company. It doesn’t just evolve.

Brian Jones:

Absolutely.

Adam Kerpelman:

Someone has to go, “You know what? If we fed people on site, X would be different.”

Brian Jones:

Right?

Adam Kerpelman:

Now, sometimes that’s about that we would get more hours of productivity. But it’s one of the other arguments, though. And this is why you look at Facebook and Google and some of their levels of cultural success, the next level way of thinking about the cafeteria is, “Also then, if we make the cafeteria dope, people will be happier.”

Mark Richardson:

Right? The happiness quota goes up. If you have a nap pod and you’re not going to be penalized, you’re not going to be fired because you took a 45 minute nap in between your coding assignments-

Adam Kerpelman:

The nap pod is right behind me.

Mark Richardson:

You know? That’s additive. That’s not detracting from your productivity.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah, I found the same thing at Forrester. At the summit. One of the great things I think D&B did was they sent us to this booth. And we were a presenting sponsor for Forrester. But we also had cornhole. Inside-

Brian Jones:

Yeah. That was a huge hit.

Mark Richardson:

And it was a huge hit. And we thought… And it was kind of innocuous, we were like, “Oh yeah. Oh yeah, we’ll set up the cornhole, start playing some cornhole.” And dude, how many leads, how many great conversations did our sales guys have? Just because there were people being goofy and started playing some light ambient beats, and we played cornhole and people founded a fun place to hang out. Eventually we talked data, but at first it was just like what you said, it was recognizing humans being together and having real human interactions. Plain and simple.

Adam Kerpelman:

I was listening to some podcast recently, where some comedian was just saying, “Look man, I’ll tell you. All you need to know in life is that being a good hang will get you everywhere you need to go.”

Brian Jones:

Totally. I agree with that. That’s a great comment.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

But it applies to that, for sure. The event space?

Mark Richardson:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

I’ve literally set up couches at events before, and they work. People have tired feet. And you’re like, “Here’s a place to sit.”

Brian Jones:

You’ve got to have an eject button there, though. You can’t just have the same person on the couch. You got to churn and get some leads, you know?

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah.

Brian Jones:

Along with the remote aspect of business, so something you said a minute ago, or belong with the… We’re in a squishy time period with the transition from offices to remote, and how do we balance that? And how do we build the personality? We’re also in a squishy time with what the priorities are for companies and businesses and what we want our world to look like.

And it’s absolutely unacceptable to me for the primary goal of a business to just be to make money. It’s not acceptable. I appreciate that that is what keeps the business alive. Right? That has to happen. That has to be a goal. But it’s absolutely unacceptable to not have people be an equal priority. And honestly, be more of a priority. Because the other things come from that, right? If people are happy and excited and enjoy their work and they have a dynamic atmosphere and they have the freedom to engage and find their fulfillment, you’ll hire better people. You’ll retain people. They’ll collaborate more effectively. They’ll work harder. Right? I’ll work 80 hours a week if I like it. I’m barely going to work what is required of me if I’m not having fun. Right? These are obvious things. But that’s a huge cultural shift too, right? I feel guilty and like I’m saying something against the rules when I say those things. And I don’t mean within D&B, I mean within my own being, right? Because how many times in business school was I talked about profits for shareholders? Come on.

Adam Kerpelman:

Workforce happiness, at some point, matters. And then that ties back right now, for our generation, this is more evident than… I feel this way more since having a child. To be sure. But it’s like, “Okay, there are real, global problems here now. And if a company that I’m working for doesn’t care about them because money, I can’t… It’s a waste of my time.” It’s not the thing that’s going to protect the-

Brian Jones:

It’s deadly.

Adam Kerpelman:

… planet for my children. It’s literally deadly. If they don’t believe that, I’ll shout it to the top of the leadership chain.

Mark Richardson:

Yep.

Adam Kerpelman:

It’s not… We have a real problem here, in terms of the melting of the planet and the state of-

Mark Richardson:

Yeah. And I think in terms of where we are now, I’ve met hundreds of people within Dun & Bradstreet and I really like everyone I’ve worked with. And I really mean everyone. You have different relationships with different people and different engagements with them, but tons of really smart, interesting, ambitious creative people. And a consistent theme across everyone, is everybody is hungry for innovation and eager to look at great ways we can change and adapt. And especially at a leadership level. Right? And you mentioned earlier, Adam, about how D&B was taken private a few years ago and then taken public again. And you do that to shift things. And there’s a lot of new leadership across the whole company. And there’s a lot of initiatives to revolutionize the business. Right? And move it forward in a big, aggressive way. And we’re experiencing some of that, right? Because we are going through a triple merger while the whole company is being reimagined, too. It’s just-

Adam Kerpelman:

Chaos.

Mark Richardson:

… and some of the stuff we encounter day to day that’s frustrating, it’s just bad timing.

Adam Kerpelman:

For sure.

Mark Richardson:

And there’s also so many… There’s a whole suite of products that I feel like it’s easy to feel when you have a great platform or product, or a SAS product a DAS product, like we were marketing as Netwise, the startup. It’s easy to feel like, “Okay, this big company’s coming in and buying us and all they want is the tech.” But D&B came in and specifically said, “We love what you’re doing on the engineering side. We love what you’re doing on the marketing side. We want all your talent. We want the ideas, we want your energy, we want your motivation. We want your collaborative knowhow. Your comms knowhow.” All of that rolled into what they already know is a challenge. You know what I mean? The things, when we talk about chaos, it’s like, that’s something that’s [inaudible 00:41:17]-

Adam Kerpelman:

It has to be. There’s not a non-chaotic way to coordinate this many people.

Brian Jones:

Big time.

Mark Richardson:

Right. Right.

Brian Jones:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

It’s just not. I mean, and that’s from a lifetime of experience coordinating people. Large groups of people. Trying to get 10-year-olds not to do a thing is not dissimilar from getting 30-

Brian Jones:

We don’t employ 10-year-olds here, just to be clear.

Adam Kerpelman:

No, I’m talking about my coaching experience. Is not dissimilar from getting 30 people of any age to do something.

Brian Jones:

Absolutely.

Adam Kerpelman:

In the extent to which it just is going to feel like-

Brian Jones:

Yep.

Mark Richardson:

… a little bit of chaos. And a lot of it’s, too, processes you’re used to. It’s just like, “I’m in a habit.” Not necessarily a bad habit, it’s just a habit way of doing stuff that you have to fix or change.

Adam Kerpelman:

Anyway. It feels like a good place to actually wrap it up this time. Thanks for dropping in, Brian.

Brian Jones:

Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

And thanks to everybody for listening. Stick around for more Brian.

Brian Jones:

Woo.

Adam Kerpelman:

We’re working him into the schedule more, now that things are slowing down a little.

Mark Richardson:

Back in the fold.

Adam Kerpelman:

This has been the Data Driven Marketer. I’m Adam.

Brian Jones:

I’m Brian.

Mark Richardson:

And I’m Mark.

Brian Jones:

Take it easy everybody.

Mark Richardson:

Thanks for listening to the Data Driven Marketer. Our show is produced by Jessica Jacobson and Dan Celsius. This episode was edited by Steve Kosh. The Data Driven Marketer is sponsored by Netwise, a Dun & Bradstreet company. Any views or opinions expressed in this episode do not represent the views or opinions of Netwise or Dun & Bradstreet.