Get Amplified
Get Amplified
Teaming: Problem Solving at Scale
What better way to launch Season 6 of Get Amplified than with the experienced and innovative GTM leader, Ross Brown.
This episode is jam packed with stories and nuggets of partnering strategy. You’ll need your fast listening ears as it is a wild ride with some brilliant metaphors and stories that had us leaning in for more!
With an impressive career that spans over three decades, including senior leadership roles at Citrix, Microsoft, VMware, and Oracle, we delve into the topic of teaming at scale. Ross shares his vast experience and insights into how strategic partnerships can drive efficiency and success.
We discuss how businesses can thrive by focusing on their core competencies and outsourcing the rest. Through relatable examples like the UK's wine industry and the metaphor of house building, we hear how specialization leads to greater value creation.
Getting into the nitty gritty, we discuss driving behavioural change through well-designed incentives, using Microsoft's transition to a rateable revenue model as a case study.
Ross shares riveting stories of deep tech partnerships, such as those between Oracle, Accenture, and Quantify, that showcase the transformative power of clear role alignment and expertise sharing.
This episode offers a compelling take on how effective teaming and trust-building are crucial in today’s competitive landscape.
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Welcome to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group, bringing you stories to help leaders in the tech industry execute their speed through the power of working together. Well, blimey, vicky, it's been a hot minute, hasn't it?
Vicky:A hot minute. That's a good one, yes it has.
Sam:When was the last one? February? It really was. Yeah, let me neck. Yeah, what you've been up to you've. You've been ignoring me.
Vicky:I've been sad I don't say that, no, um, it has been a busy time for us, so you've been doing actual work rather than chatting to me through the power of Zoom. Well, you know we talk about prioritisation. One of our team and I'm sure she won't mind me saying Lindsey Moore last year was diagnosed with cancer.
Vicky:And so she has been working really hard to get over that and I'm very, very glad to say that she's on the right side of that now. So she's back with us, which is wonderful. But having one member of the team off has meant, with the significant amount of client work we've had, we had to prioritise and we had to prioritise and put our clients first. So that's what life gets in the way of work yes, just a little bit um, so it is great to be back.
Sam:I've missed you too, although it's given me lots of space to rock out rather than chat out, so that's all good. So who have we got to welcome us back into the world of podcasts? We must have somebody extremely illustrious lined up for today, right? Well, of course, as always, all our guests extremely illustrious lined up for today, right? Well, of course, as always, all our guests are illustrious.
Vicky:He needs no introduction. So today we have with us.
Sam:But you're going to introduce him anyway, right?
Vicky:Yeah, we have Ross Brown, who I think we have known each other crikey 20-odd years, I think.
Ross:It's been a while. I guess it's been a while it goes back to 2002, I guess, so 22 years, yeah.
Vicky:so it's wonderful to have Ross on and we're kicking off this new series. So this is series six, and what has become very apparent is that what we do and how we explain what we do, we're about teaming. So what does teaming really mean? And so we're going to use that as the theme for this whole series. And Ross, I know, fully gets the value of teaming, so I thought it'd be wonderful to have him on to talk to us.
Sam:Welcome, ross. Thanks, sam, good to be here. Ross and I of course met in my days of working with the VMware Advisory Council and, if I remember rightly, you were in charge of partners worldwide.
Ross:Yeah, we're in global partnerships at VMware privilege of launching two public clouds, both Azure, as then a partner strategy at Microsoft. And then I got to do Oracle, most recently with the launch of OCI. But I met Vicky back in the days at Citrix and doing the work on spreading the good news about virtual desktops and how they save people a bunch of money and make SAP actually work and things like that. So I've been around that group quite a while.
Sam:I'm most interested to understand what you're up to now, but give us a quick canter through your career today and bring us up to speed, if you don't mind.
Ross:I was joking at an industry event in August that I was at that I've been working with partners and teaming with other companies for as long as Taylor Swift's been alive. I entered my tech career in 1989 when I graduated college and started working as a developer first and foremost. I really started as a coder and quickly realized what a horrible career choice that was. So I moved over to managing a VAR. I ran a micro-age franchise in Central Florida and then did a short stint in worldwide technology helping them build their Florida business before they decided they expanded too fast but really jumped over to TechData in 1991 and built the software business there and then went over to IBM and helped IBM figure out how to work with other companies.
Ross:Working at TechData is the ultimate teaming job. You're helping 192 software companies figure out how to find a market in a relatively short time period and then with IBM you're helping IBM figure out how to take these crown jewels in their database platform with DB2 and move it on to things like HPUX and Sun Solaris and Windows NT. So that was my job is go make DB2 a multi-platform product and go figure out channel partners to work with and stuff. And then from there I left IBM and went to a consulting firm where I got to work with a bunch of tech companies on core go-to-market strategies, and one of those was Citrix Systems, where I helped build their first licensing program and a bunch of other stuff. And then Mark, the CEO there, who is a tremendous CEO, after doing a bunch of projects, said I need you to come work here and help me turn the place around.
Ross:So I joined in 2002, built the first deal reg program and did a bunch of other stuff there to sort of right the ship at Citrix and then became CEO of a company in California that's now part of Beyond Trust and then after that went to Microsoft to help launch Azure and really convert Microsoft from a reseller license-oriented transactional channel company to one that worked with services partners and drove consumption of cloud services as opposed to licensing events. I had a great experience there, started a company called the Spur Group that's now doing quite well in Seattle as part of Reply and then after that went to VMware and then, after some time at VMware and putting VMware on all the public clouds, I went over to Oracle and the last four years have been helping launch and build OCI as their cloud infrastructure offering and then, most recently, leading partners there. I left there in. This is a long-winded thing. Taylor Swift's been alive a long time, so it takes a while to get there, so it would have been.
Sam:Yeah, I was hoping you might slip some Taylor Swift songs into your.
Ross:There's a challenge for you, so yeah, I left in March Part of work my wife and I have been doing in investing in tech companies. We both invest capital and our own sweat equity into helping companies that are usually started by technologists that need help in getting to market better. He's been doing for about three and a half four years now and that one's scaling nicely and announced a big partnership with AT&T this past week. It's a really big step forward for them as a company, and I've been working closely with a company called EmployPlan, which solves a problem near and dear to my heart with partners, which you know at its core as a technology guy.
Ross:On the vendor side, we think of partners as selling our tech, but the reality is they're delivering projects for customers and the majority of their work is actually the services work they do.
Ross:So we've built a platform that allows them to manage projects better by setting the project up right and tracking all of the skill and experiences their bench has experiences their bench has so we can automate the process of assigning the right person to the right job in every project by knowing discrete skills and what they're good at and who's got what experiences and whatnot. So I'm working on an employee plan now and helping them scale up, and we're doing some really incredible stuff I can't wait to announce, but I can't tell about yet. But this notion of being able to verify that somebody has the experience as a contractor that you want and being able to test it in a way that proves to you that they can actually do the work you're hiring them to do, and not just they've passed a test, but they've got demonstrable coding experiences that we can test in a real AI environment. That'll be built into our product in the next 60 days in a way that I think is's going to be really astounding.
Sam:So yeah, Can I buy it 15 years ago please?
Ross:No, what price is $10?
Sam:Quite the journey then. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. You're not eyeing up retirement and a life of playing the bass like?
Vicky:me Can you imagine us retiring? Well, no, I think it's the point.
Ross:But uh, no, I've still got a kid at home, and you know, you get to this point where it's like if you have to get up to take them to school, you got to get up to work anyway. So yeah, fair enough yeah, might as well.
Sam:Fantastic. So let's get get into the teaming thing. You know, obviously, a lifetime or a career lifetime of being involved in that kind of thing, and you know not just running teams within the businesses that you've worked in, but running teams across businesses that have collaborated together under your watch, I guess. Do you want to talk us through that?
Ross:Well, let's talk about where teaming became really impactful for me early on, and I'm going to blame rolling stone magazine for this. Um, to tie it back to the rock music stuff, there's a writer, P. J O'Rourke, who is one of their political writers. He wrote a book called Eat the Rich, which was kind of a treatise on economics from a conservative viewpoint and I am not in any way shape or form. Uh, what full disclosure for everyone. Anyone would consider conservative in any shape or form. So, but I I was like reading economics and stuff, and there was this thing he wrote about in the book not to give him more praise than he deserves, but he writes about economics as a guy trying to discover economics. And he asked the question like isn't everything important in economics obvious? Like the law of supply and demand and the Laffer curve? Like that's obvious. If you have more supply, prices will go down. You have less supply demands, high prices will go up. Okay, that makes sense. And so he had this general principle that everything in economics that is important is obvious and everything that is non-obvious is not important, with one thing, which was the law of comparative advantage. And Ricardo's law of comparative advantage basically says hey, it's better for France to make wine and England to make cotton shirts than it is for both of them to make wine and shirts because, by definition, one of them's better at one of those than the other.
Ross:He uses this hilarious example of Stephen King and Courtney Love, where one of them's better at one of those than the other. He uses this hilarious example of Stephen King and Courtney Love where both of them have written books. Courtney Love has an autobiography and both of them have written music. Stephen King is a member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band with Amy Tan and a bunch of other people that play at the Booksellers Convention, but in no way, shape or form, is it economically advantageous to have Courtney Love continue to write books or for Stephen King to continue to make music, because they're just clearly better.
Ross:Even though, as he correctly points out, stephen King, in his worst day as a musician, was a better musician than Courtney Love. As a musician, he's just such an astoundingly better writer it economically makes more sense for him to stick to writing than it does for him to to go into doing this. I'll make the argument, as long as I'm talking to people in the uk, that the uk is right now making some of the best method champenois products in a in the world right now because of what's happening with global warming and the shifting of what's happening south in bristol and stuff quick, quick plug for the harrow and hope vineyard on the slopes of marlow, just just about three or four miles away from where I'm sitting right now.
Ross:My favorite sparkling wine in the world you guys are killing it with Bolney and Digby's Leander and a couple other ones that are coming out of there, where it's sort of breaking that law of comparative advantage where it actually might be in your interest to make champagne and not just France. But but this was a really profound thing for me of this notion that was a non-obvious economic concept of it's better to go get somebody who's specialised in doing something and partner with them than it was to try to be good at everything and this is kind of the jack of all trades, master of nothing. And that was profound for me as a college student to realize this notion of specialization and partnering and teaming, to not have to try to have every asset but to know somebody who has that skill, has that capability, and to have the orientation towards partnering well with others. That seemed to make a lot of sense to me. So I built a career out of it and fell into it. You know, cole and Courtney Love in the same conversation.
Sam:That is quite impressive. I did not know that Stephen King was a musician.
Ross:Yeah, Rock by the Remainers, him and Dave Barry and AB Tan and a couple others. I'll look it up.
Sam:I'll look it up. I think maybe you're being a bit mean to Courtney Love as a musician.
Ross:I don't know, the best song was written by Billy. What's his name? From Smashing Pumpkins, billy Corgan. Yeah, okay, yeah, right, yeah. And she had the best bass player in Grunge, melissa Optima.
Vicky:Right come on boys Move on.
Sam:Yeah, fair enough, we could go down a complete.
Vicky:I know you could, I know you could, I, we could go down a complete.
Speaker 1:I know you could. I know you could. I just have to give praise to Offenbauer.
Ross:She's an incredible bass player. Yeah.
Sam:I'd second that. Why is this stuff important? You know, can't you just get companies to do everything?
Ross:Not with a decent capital allocation model, and that's the nature of it, right, you know, I know you guys have worked with paul weefels and the guys of the casual group before this notion of core versus context and stuff they've talked about for years of, yeah, what's the core differentiator that's going to really make a difference in your business that you need to own and really be the expert at, and what are the things that you're going to rent or buy because you don't need to be an expert at? And so, like, this is one of those areas where I think teaming is an art of knowing when do I really need to team here, when do I need to have in-house and when does my existing teaming give way to new services or new capabilities? And that's kind of when you break up with somebody and decide it's time to go find yourself, and then there's the scaling, replicating aspect of the business, right, and so for me, as of having been on the vendor side for so many years, the reason you team is because you have you know, I joke with people all the time that we're in the plumbing business. We sell sinks, right, we don't sell houses. Our partners build houses and they buy sinks as part of the house. Nobody's going to buy a house without a sink, but they're certainly not going to build a house because they need a place to put a sink right. It's part of the functionality of it.
Ross:So I just look at it and say, if you're going to be in the sync business, you got to be friends with house builders pretty fast because they're the source of demand and consumption of why choose your sync, why install it, why do that? And so I've always approached the partnering aspect in a similar way, where I'm specializing to be really good at building a thing, whether that thing is a database or a cloud service or a resource management platform or a single pane of glass for IoT or those sorts of things, and you're really good at solving the problem the customer has, which is how do I manage all these IoT devices, or how do I put the right person on the right project, or how do I get better performance out of my ERP environment, or all those problems are kind of a mix of come do something and do something with a thing, and so if I'm in the thing business, it very defines itself as I need people who are in the do something with things business. If I'm in the thing, business right.
Sam:That's why it's so important, right makes makes, makes perfect sense real, simple, clear explanation yeah.
Vicky:So what you're talking about there, about teaming, ross, I think you could intertwine with partnering. They're one and the same from that perspective. But we've been doing quite a bit of work, looking at Amy, ed and executing and learning at the same time. So we're continuingly evolving, and I think part of because we say we're about teamwork and you tend to think of a team as a rigid organization or whereas actually I think in the world that's changing so fast now, she describes it as coming together on the fly and across barriers, and I think that's where your description of teaming and our use of teaming kind of comes together. But it's about bringing people together.
Ross:So I think there's some frameworks that are helpful around what makes it work well when you're pulling people together, because I think you can have all the goodwill in the world, but purpose defines it.
Vicky:Yes, it does yeah.
Ross:One of the notions of it, if you use the word team as a verb, is that there's a defined role and you almost have this Ocean Eleven's view in your head of like I need a safe guy, I need an explosions guy, I need a getaway guy.
Ross:You know that, that sort of what's your role on the team. When I'm working with partners, it's very clear your job is to create a customer instance of the solution and my job is to build a thing that you can use to do that. When you're peer to peer partnering, it's a little different. You know, when you're two services companies coming together to work together, or you're a marketing agency working with the CMO and their team, where you're operating as a specialist but you're occupying a role. You're occupying I'm the creative input here, whereas you're the governing input around spend and what our targets are. I'm on the how do we get there right as the marketing services room room. So I think this notion of defining your value and having clarity around what role you're going to play, and then you know being able to trust that that person can deliver the role, because you know we've all been in meetings where people like each other but they can't define their roles well enough, and they really don't know I really like that yeah so what?
Vicky:you've just used three of our formula words there purpose, trust and clarity. And we have had so many discussions about the order of those words. And why is purpose first versus trust? Because, to your point, you can have a bunch of people together in a room that trust each other, but if they haven't got a purpose, why they're there in the first place? And what you were just talking about there was individual purposes, but actually they need to come together with a common purpose, and that's the first reason to then go build that trust. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally.
Ross:I'm really good friends with a guy who recently sold the business but ran a body shop and he repairs cars, like after insurance, accidents stuff like that. I'm a tech guy who builds clouds. We have no common purpose for partnering together. We love each other to death. We love to find a way to work together. We have great relationship. We always enjoy every time we're with each other. But there's no common purpose there. There's no role we can occupy, so teaming isn't really possible there.
Sam:And I see a lot of you might as well just drink beer together.
Ross:We do, we've sorted out our purpose, but that is kind of. I think one of the things is having clarity of role. I think is really key in the beginning of why do I need this partnership and is this ephemeral partnering or is this a longer term strategic partnership? That I'm choosing and I think knowing that in the beginning also is really important. Of like, are we dating, are we getting married? Like a product, integration is a pretty deep teaming, yeah, where it's kind of hard to get done with that, whereas a marketing agency you can change yeah, I'm not the right right person to talk about that, considering it took john and I what?
Vicky:22 years before we got married yeah, your little commitment forward there.
Ross:Meanwhile, melody asked me on our third week together are you in or out?
Vicky:yeah, that sounds like melody.
Sam:Yeah, good for him yeah, brilliant, one of the things that I think you might be able to shed some light and we talked about this on the podcast before but the, the interaction, the interplay between corp and field right, you know, that's another form of of teaming. You know, I guess you've got the ideas and the structure and the product and the go-to-market and then you've got the on the ground execution in different and I know you've done global roles, so different geos around the world. How does that play out?
Ross:David Schawel. So it's interesting thing because in a corporate role you have a service orientation and you have a governance orientation and they interplay. Because on one level there is how do you find the repeatable patterns of success that are occurring in the field and the conditions of that success and then build it so that the extraordinary becomes the ordinary, like what natural athletes are able to figure out. You're able to go teach middle of the road people how to perform. Like those natural athletes, they become trained athletes as opposed to naturalists. Like those natural athletes, they become trained athletes as opposed to naturalists.
Ross:So a big part of that is how do you discover what's working and replicate and create the conditions of replication? Really well, and a lot of that's a surface orientation, like hey, we know this team is killing it. Here's how they're killing it. Let's make sure everybody else knows how they're doing that. And then the governance aspect is once you know those are the behaviors, how do you set up the incentives and inducements in a way that those are rewarded, so it becomes the fastest way to achieve.
Ross:your commission is to do this and there's scorecard methods there right, but you're never in place is either because somebody's misbehaving and doing something that would be out of the spirit of partnering well, but really you know doing things that are gaming a system or whatnot that you want to control for, or because they're success behaviors you want to replicate at scale and you really want to be able to make sure that we're achieving those outcomes that you're able to natural athletes. So I think that's one part of it is knowing when you're operating, you know as a service orientation layer of making sure you're acting as that replication and connection layer. So that's one. The second aspect I think is really important is, like I used to joke at Microsoft we're in the 98052 zip code is where Microsoft is based, and I used to joke with people at corporate all the time about do you have any idea how much revenue we actually make out of this zip code? It's very small, like there's not a lot of other major corporations besides Microsoft within the 98052 zip code. It's us and you know a couple of paint supply stores and auto body shops like that. So the result of which is I'm trying to make folks at corporate when I was at Microsoft keenly aware that revenue is coming as an interaction between our field and customers, with our partners out there, not here. So if you're not operating here in a service orientation to benefit the folks that are out there, then you're not really adding any value to the entire process.
Ross:So I think, first and foremost, there is a how am I serving the field orientation that has to be paramount for that partnership to work well, because you know any partner measured as a result of value created together, and if the field looks at you as a corporate person and says all I get out of this person is requests for reports and you know QBRs where I'm told I'm doing it wrong and no real questions about what's working and what isn't, how can I make your job easier and how do I accelerate these outcomes for you?
Ross:That's kind of you can spot those guys a mile away and they end up never getting good results because nobody trusts them. There's no feedback of here's what I need. So for me, I think that's always been kind of one of the really key things for us to really focus on first and foremost is what value are we creating for the field in this interaction? And if you're not creating value, how are you uncovering a source of value then can replicate. Then the field actually look and go hey, you're a valuable person to talk to, not I have to because you came from fort lauderdale or seattle or wherever. I guess that's kind of the first and foremost. Is that level of do something valuable.
Vicky:Yeah, right so what you've just said, I mean it's just a delight to to listen to. But you know we did a podcast with Paul Weefles. We talked about him earlier.
Vicky:And it was about sell the platform and what does that mean? And he was talking about being customer-centric and, instead of corporates looking in a mirror, looking through the window and really understanding what was needed. Really understanding what was needed. And and the reason we asked him to to do that topic was because we just see so many organizations that are so corporate centric and so looking in the mirror versus looking through the window, so what you're just saying I just feel is missing from so, so many global organizations. Why do you think that is Well I, and am I being harsh saying that?
Ross:No, you're not being harsh and I'm going to try to be nice about it.
Ross:But I've worked with a fair number of people who do a fair job of managing up at corporate instead of managing out well, and so for them they look at the field as you're a source for me to gather stories, gather relevant anecdotes, to be able to support my point of view that I want to convince other people in corporate. So that corporate centric view of the problem is above me. I just need to convince the people above me that I can do stuff for them, as opposed to, the problems are out in our field and I need to convince the field that I can actually help them solve those problems. Now both of them can be successful behaviors because those same people above are also talking to the field and asking them what's working and valuable and where are you getting help and stuff. So you kind of have to kind of manage both effectively.
Ross:But I think if you start with that orientation of what am I doing to make the field's job easier, you build a lot of credibility. And then, if you get that like I'll just pick on like Stephan Arnaud, as a fellow we worked with at VMware and Citrix. When I first met him I'm pretty sure he thought I was because I was coming in and telling him in France how to put deal registration in place, and you know he's like you don't understand how we work here and blah, blah, blah yeah.
Ross:In many ways he was right, but he was also in the tail end of a conversation I'd had with a bunch of other regional leaders where I understood the problem already. Right Now I approached that wrong. I approached it as I'm coming to tell you the answer, not I'm coming to discover with you the problem and say why are we seeing this drop off in reseller productivity and why are we seeing this downturn in performance and whatnot? And then, once it's a two-day meeting, day two I shifted my orientation into the let's talk about what's working and what's not working, got onto a shared point of view of like this is what our problems are. Oh well, here's a potential way we could solve it. And I then talked through DealWrench.
Vicky:Second day yeah, okay, got it. So, he felt listened to.
Ross:Well, yeah, listened to, but it wasn't. He felt listened to, he was listened to.
Ross:Yeah, yeah yes, like I checked myself and stepped back and go okay, even though this is the 13th country I'm now having this conversation in it's like okay, I joked about this, but I went to University of Central Florida in Orlando and, like a lot of my friends, worked at Disneyland, at Disney World as a park, and one of them did the Jungle Cruise.
Ross:And one of the things about this is you're giving this speech with corny jokes in it aimed at six and seven year olds, over and over and over, and in order to do it well, you have to memorize the entire thing and it's a good 27 minute long spiel of jokes and stuff like that. But the trick and this is what I tried to keep in my head is like the trick to doing that thing well is to deliver it every time, like it's the first time you've ever delivered it. And that's kind of the challenge in a corporate role is you might be talking to 13 different regions of Microsoft or 52 different operating entities around the world for Oracle or whatnot. That conversation has to be the first time you're hearing that problem, because their problem is unique. It's not a pattern, it's their problem. It's not another data point in a chart I'm building. It's the reality they live every day and unless they feel heard on that reality, they don't effectively feel communicated with and, as a result, you get weird data out of them and you get cagey discussions.
Vicky:It's trust again, isn't it?
Ross:It's down to trust. Well, and showing that you're not going to take the information you're getting from them and use it for your own benefit and not their benefit, and that's fundamentally it, I guess.
Vicky:Which goes back to what you were saying before about you're playing a service role to the field.
Sam:Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know it's lovely to hear ross enunciate these things that I sort of know intuitively, yeah, but actually to have it described in cogent and understandable words is fab, um. And also that you know, from my point of view, operating as part of a reseller service provider whatever the hell we're called these days in the back end of little old England, facing up against some of these corporate behemoths headquartered way over in America. I wish more execs would have Ross's approach.
Vicky:Yeah.
Sam:Because it would have helped us to help them to understand that you know, europe is not the same as the us and actually even within europe there are many different countries with many slightly individual problems and yes, you know there is an overall thrust that that brings us all together. But spain is different from Germany, is different from the Netherlands, is different from the UK. So you know, it's good to hear that articulated and you know, if you could just let every software exec in the USA know about that, please, ross, I would. Yeah, thanks, you probably know most of them. Anyway, let me just post that to X real quick.
Sam:What about the people think? You know you've you've clearly taken some, some big organizations through some some pretty whinging changes. You know, a lot of your uh stuff seems to me to have been about that. That transition from buy the thing to subscribe to stroke consume the thing. That's massive. You cannot understate the pain of that, with the transitions in revenues and Salesforce compensation and so on. How do you handle the people element with all of that stuff?
Ross:Well, it's important to realize when you're doing any sort of big change. Well, it's important to realize when you're doing any sort of big change, how can you make the change align with the way people's behavior is set up to behave anyway, right? So a great example of this, without getting into too much detail, because this is kind of boring math stuff 365 was called BPOS or business productivity line suite. The product management team there had this great idea of like hey, we like what Salesforce has got going on with this whole rateable revenue thing and subscriptions and stuff. So, logically, why don't we move to a model that says we'll pay the partner 12% of the annual subscription value for moving somebody over and then 6% for managing the environment. So 18 points on the first year and then 6% for managing the environment. So 18 points on the first year and then 6% every year thereafter. But we'll pay them on a monthly as-billed basis. So hey, I've got this customer, I've landed them, they've got 700 users or whatever moving over at $24 a month and so okay, that's going to be 135K or whatever in annualized basis. So okay, that's going to be $135K or whatever on an annualized basis and I'm going to get paid. Let me look at my commission check. $600 a month is coming to me as a result of that Great Well, that's nice, but that's not the $60,000 in margin I would have made and earned 10% on that margin for moving an exchange migration up front as a one-year license sale.
Ross:Yeah, as a one-year license sale. So they introduced an economic model that made raging logical sense to the project managers, but with such a material change to the way people were paid in the field that it was rejected immediately. I mean, everybody internal to Microsoft and in the partner community was like no, that's not how we pay our people and you're, in essence, driving a shift in the pricing strategy of the product, which is driving a shift to the economic model to us as a partner, without having a conversation of does that make any sense to us at all as a business? And the answer, by the way, just to give the history lesson, was no, it doesn't. It makes no sense to anybody.
Ross:And, as a result, large sales, just flatline on that product.
Sam:Been a bit on the receiving end of some of that pain over the years as well.
Ross:line on that product Been on the receiving end of some of that pain over the years as well. And then this realization of how do you make that change and do it in a way that fits the way people already behave. Okay, well, let's sell a license entitlement because they're already budgeting for. I got to buy Exchange this year and I got to buy the licenses for Outlook, so let's just do it at the one time. We know how many users you have on exchange. You've got 700 of them. Let's sell you a entitlement for 12 months of Office 365 for 700 users as a one-time licensing fee. You pay it all up front like you would on a regular license. I create a marginable event as a prepaid license for the channel. It fits their economic model.
Ross:But when it comes up for renewal, here's a little secret. Nobody likes doing renewals and most of the times if it's a rateable product they just do them anyway. So I don't really need to pay the channel a commission on the renewal business as much as they need to put a lot more on, go get more customers on, and so that leads to a shift over time that says don't even bother on the renewal, just make it 18 points on the front end and give them all the money up front and make them capitalize the whole thing up front as one deal. So that's an example of how do you take the declared strategy if we want rateable revenue, package it in a way that fits the way people behave and then create this bridge strategy that says it fits your economics but it drives the long-term economics the company's looking for and everybody's happy because it fits the behavioral model we're shooting for. So that's a real tactical example of I've got a behavior I'm not going to shift in partners. I've got a desire I'm not going to shift in product managers.
Ross:You know it's the old Richard Feynman physicist. Has his problem solving algorithm, which I love, which is, you know, solving a problem is really easy. Step one write down the problem. Step two think hard. Step three write down the answer. The challenge you laugh but it really works because that one the hard part writing down the actual problem.
Ross:The problem was not how do you drive rateable revenue, the problem was how do you transition a deal centric channel into a rateable revenue business? Yeah, once you looked at that problem in the right way, thinking hard and writing down the answer became relatively easy. Right, so that's the only practical I can give you is like when you're looking at it from a people standpoint, as you're looking and going, how do I move the least amount of cheese as possible so that people perceive I'm still living in the same safe environment, I don't feel threatened, I don't feel existentially like despair or any of that stuff. But now all of a sudden, I'm discovering a whole new set of behaviors that are usable. Like. I'm going to tell you a trick on 35 years of doing incentives.
Ross:The real real on incentives and what makes them really work is when you're incenting them to engage in a behavior that becomes self-rewarding anyway. Like why deal reg worked was because it rewarded people to go out and create a new set of business. They then built a services business around. It didn't say, hey, we're going to create a your services business and pay you more on margin of fund. And there's right, it got them into something that was a very profitable business to be in, but it rewarded them for creating it as opposed to just serving it. Right, yes, so the like that's the real trick is an incentive shouldn't drive behavior permanently. It should drive a change to behavior that then becomes a permanent behavior and you can remove the because it's the right thing to do yeah right.
Ross:You just built a new muscle, not forced. A new action, I guess, is the right way to think about it.
Sam:Yeah, that makes sense. That's logical. Really interesting. As we start to wrap up, can you give us a concrete example of where this teaming thing has delivered fabulous results?
Vicky:Just one, your favorite one.
Ross:I'll talk about particular partnerships at Oracle that we had because, look, oracle is a very different partnering business than any other company I've ever worked at. Whereas Microsoft was concerned about 400,000 partners dealing with millions of businesses, fundamentally Oracle is really concerned about 3,000 customers. Those 3, 000 customers happen to run everything in the world, like all the governments and you know major manufacturers, the major telephone systems, but central banks, etc. Yeah, it's, every globally systemic important business is built on oracle and what you realize very quickly is that company is not oriented as the way microsoft has their. Let a thousand flowers bloom of partners and go out and find the value you want. In our partner ecosystem it's we, oracle will move the earth for you as a customer and we'll pull everybody in we need to to make it happen. So there's a high partnering orientation around serving those high value customers. So that leads to some weird partnering where it's you know Oracle services working with Accenture services and bringing in a specialist who's a deep specialist in Cerner, who understands the healthcare space really well, to be able to create a joint solution. As an example.
Ross:My favorite example in this area has to do with AI and the rise of specialized firms in that area where, you know, a lot of the GSIs have really deep benches. They know machine learning, they know the space well, but there's a difference between applying a large language model and actually building one from scratch and doing the core development work behind it. So, you know, NVIDIA connected us with a company called Quantify, with Sid Nag and the guys there in India who were probably one of the best companies at the software side of how do you actually build and use large language models, especially doing retrieval, augmented generative AI, where you're plugging large datasets into an LLM and then building an actual product out of it. Well, that was an example where we partnered with them and connected them deeply with Accenture to go deliver solutions for customers. Where Accenture had the industry trust and the customer trust. Quantify had the deep expertise in the technology.
Ross:Oracle had the infrastructure on the data side and the infrastructure on the GPU side to build these things and that was, like you know, a really great example of how do you have everybody understand their role.
Ross:You're the experts in the AI stuff, you're the experts in the customer problem set, we're the experts in the technology. So we all have clarity on our role, we all know what our business models are and we all know how to work well together and we're all unified around solving a problem for this particular enterprise entity that was intractable, big and solving it had huge economic value for the customer. So those are examples where I look at it, where it's like it's not just hey, we learned to partner well many times, which is kind of the programmatic view of partnering that a lot of people have, but we learned to partner deeply and go build something that was repeatable, that solved an industry problem, that really could save lives right and getting to the use case here and stuff. So those examples of being able to partner deeply as well as partner broadly, I think, are where it delivers great results, where there's clarity on those things, you have clear purpose, you understand each other's value and you understand what makes the partnership work.
Sam:I wish I could give you more details on some of these. They're still under NDA. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, you know, I was pretty sure you're solving some, some hefty problems with this, with this stuff. You know you, it's only technology. It's not life or death, but some of the projects that I'm sure Oracle got involved in can be life or death.
Ross:I do want to tell you one really cool example of teaming, which is problem solving at scale. I will name names, but this is Deloitte working with us with our Java team. We have this thing at Oracle called MSET2, which is Multi-State Estimation Technique 2. It's a patented machine learning technology that Oracle built for doing anomaly detection on scale systems. We built the math for 1970s for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Ross:There's a problem in machine learning and anomaly detection of becoming overly focused on a small set of variables that are likely to be the source of a problem. So let's say you've got 3,000 sensors and the last thousand times something's gone wrong. It's been one of these 10. Okay well, machine learning models get tuned over time to pay attention to those 10 really closely and kind of ignore the other 9,990 sensors that are there. Mset2 doesn't have that disorder. It looks at everything in real time, live, as it's occurring, without an attention disorder.
Ross:The challenge we had was how do you make that work on a remote oil rig where there's no connection back to the cloud? You're not about to ship a massive data center out to every single oil rig. And so Deloitte partnered with our Java team, who partnered with Oracle Consulting. Typically, oracle Consulting and Deloitte would not partner together. They would be competitors. Yeah, to design a running M-SET2 on a Graal virtual machine, on a roving edge cloud device that we could deploy from the cloud for 56 bucks a day and put it on site and run all this anomaly detection which turns out to save lots and lots and lots of lives that you know, when this oil rig is about to go, it's not just, it's going to be be $3 million a day, it's not producing, but it's a 70,000 pound wrench that may blow, and that wrench blows, it could kill somebody. So to be able to see that it's got a problem, you're, you're really making a difference there.
Ross:That was an example where Deloitte had great trust of the customer with neighbor's energy. You had, you know, this M set two team who trusted the Oracle consulting team because it's Java code, it could be decompiled easily, it's just compiled on time, and we had to find a way to get the consulting team to work with the Java development team, to work with the hardware team, to work with the Deloitte team in a high trust environment with a customer who did not believe it could be done, and so that required a high degree of get everyone together in the same room understand what we're trying to build, that this has never been done before, to have real-time anomaly detection in a non-cloud connected system running with GPUs for less than 100 bucks a day. If we can hit that as a milestone, we can put this on every oil rig in America. That's an example where the customer need was the unifying thing that brought us together to partner.
Ross:Nobody's ego got in the away, because we're really clear of like, the mission here is either solve this problem or don't. Yeah, not, not we win, you lose.
Sam:But either we all win and solve this or we all lose yeah, and that that stuff has got to start from a the customer need point of view, not from the point, not the full point of view of hey guys, we've got this whiz-bang machine learning model. You know it's got to be customer-in rather than technology-out.
Ross:Right that was one of my questions was that we'd only ever sold M-SET to through Oracle Consulting because, as Java, it's regular Java language. You can just read it and see what the patented code is. The fact that we were able to encapsulate it into a Graal VM and ship it as a binary encoded product that a partner can then take. It was one of those questions where I asked the development team like were you never intending for this to be a partner product? Was it always going to be? We have to control it. And the answer was we didn't know how to do it until Deloitte showed us how to embed this in Graal and deliver it that way that it made sense to us. So that was partners educating our own dev team on how to unlock the technology they had. It was really an incredible story there.
Vicky:That's a wonderful example of teaming, isn't it, and coming together to solve a problem.
Ross:Yeah.
Vicky:Yeah, really cool, really cool.
Sam:Have you got three takeaways on 35 years? I think you said earlier of partnering Boris, not the first one. I'm deliberately asking you to summarize a massive, illustrious career in about 25 years.
Ross:So be nice to everybody because you will see them again. That's absolutely.
Sam:Yeah, that makes sense.
Ross:Right, and I do mean everyone you will see them again. That's absolutely right, like, and I do mean every, everyone you will see again. And whether it's, uh, you know, at an event, or you show up to a job and they're across the table, or you worked with another place. So be nice and maintain those relationships and friendships. There are no disposable relationships.
Ross:It's number one, uh, number two, I think it's probably best if you can, early on into a problem and you know, I generally thought of my career as throwing myself into problem sets and solving them for money. Right, yeah, the first thing you want to do when you correctly identify a problem is identify all the assets around you you could partner with, like, and that is like. I wrote a white paper on the six functions of a channel chief and it really gets into like. What does it really mean to be a partner leader? Well, it means injecting partner into other workflows in the business. So quickly identifying, like who in the marketing team actually is going to be my partner on solving all these problems, who in the product team can I go work with, and developing that map of aligned things. So partnering first to find those sponsors, I guess, is really key.
Vicky:Yeah, creating your virtual team.
Ross:Yeah, and really knowing who are your confidants. That can really help you get stuff done. And the last thing I will tell you is this is going to be weird to try to say this, but the idea is paramount. And what I mean by this is, whenever you're doing a major transformation, there's a core idea inside of it. Right, when we were doing DealReg at Citrix for the first time, the core idea is wouldn't it be neat if the people who actually created our business got paid for creating our business, as opposed to the people who did a phone call wanted on price?
Ross:Wouldn't that be neat if we actually, the people who were incented to create this stuff, were actually the ones creating it, not an invert and that sort of once you get that idea out there of like, only one person knows about the deal, when it's a problem, it's when it goes out to bid to multiple people that it starts getting known. And this infected idea when you're talking about Azure and moving to consumption, this notion of what if you could package a year's consumption up as a single license that idea is what drove teaming. That idea is what drove others to say I get it. Now I want to go tell other people about it, so I use this term meme as an example, but this notion of being able to infect them with an idea is key.
Sam:Yeah, that makes sense. Light the fire a little bit.
Ross:Well, it gives them a story to tell. I mean, like, when I got done talking with Stephan Arnaud in France about what we were doing with Advisor Rewards, he went from who is this guy at corporate coming into my region to tell me and my team what we're going to do to? We have a problem and we have a proposed solution and a way that we could do that. So that idea is what got him on it, not me telling it or, like I'm from corporate, we're going to do X, it was you know. Here's the problem. Do we agree? It's a problem. Yeah, here's a proposed solution. Do we think it'll work? Yes, let's try it.
Ross:Next thing you know, he's out telling everyone else about it. Yeah, right.
Sam:He's now on your team. This is the essence of teaming Indeed.
Ross:Got any book recommendations for us? Oh God, yes, uh, I have a book I recommend to everybody. Um, I'm going to recommend two books.
Vicky:This is going to be out of left.
Ross:Cheating. It's cheating. I'm going to recommend they go together. One is Language in Thought and Action by S I Hayakawa. Now, si Hayakawa was a US senator from Hawaii, but he was a student who was a college professor. He was a PhD who taught at University of Hawaii and a couple other places, but he was a student under a guy named Alfred Korzybski who invented a school of thought called general semantics and basically we use general semantics in our jobs every day. But if you actually read SI Hayakawa's book, it's very thin. Korzybski's book is massive and it's an academic textbook with real math in it.
Ross:Hayakawa's is accessible by normal people, but he talks about like you can't have thoughts you don't have words for, and like language really dictates the way your brain works. And there's like how you use persuasion and what extensional and intentional meanings of words are, like what even what air quotes mean by an extensional meaning and stuff like that. So it's this whole notion about how language influences your thinking and how it influences your ability to act, and you know the notion that you cannot. You cannot think what you cannot create words for, and so this notion of conceptualizing stuff through language is actually the creative act of actually building anything. Right? And this is a great question Do you think Alexander Graham Bell came up with the word telephone before he created the object telephone? Right, because you have to conceptualize first what you're building before you can build it. And in conceptualizing you have to describe it to others. And so the answer is he invented the word telephone before he actually created the telephone because he had to conceptualize what it was. And so that's a pretty profound book, I think, in terms of anybody who's in the business of persuading other people or thinking about using language in ways as an executive and whatnot. So I think it's really important.
Ross:The other one's a philosophy book that's also disgustingly thin and you can blow through it in about 30 minutes, but it's worth every single minute you put into it. It's called Finite and Infinite Games by James P Kars. Now, james Kars is a philosopher. He lays this book out as a Aristotelian, two-valued orientation.
Ross:He starts out with a premise, which is there are two types of games in the world a finite game and an infinite game. The finite game is defined by a set of rules with clear winners and clear judges, like a football game lasts for 60 minutes and has four quarters, and it has 11 players on each side. Scores are done this way. Here's who the referee is. An infinite game has no time limit, has no rules, and the job is to see how can you get more players into the game, how do you get more people participating, how do you create value for everybody on the field and how do you make sure the game never ends. As a sort of way of going through life and thinking about things, I find the infinite game philosophy to be much, much more rewarding than trying to play a series of finite games. So those two books to me are profound and sort of setting the way you think about the world.
Sam:That's why I?
Ross:beat them at two.
Sam:Sport, by and large, is a finite game, whereas music is more of an infinite game.
Ross:Yeah, jazz, by definition, is about how do you pull more musicians into the melody and get them playing in a way that aligns with everybody and it's not discordant. It's a very coordinated activity. But there's also, you know, a notion of winners and losers in things that are finite games, whereas in an infinite game there's just value you just create. You know, I've always approached business as an infinite game.
Sam:Yeah, yeah, I like that. That begs some thinking about.
Vicky:Is that where? Because Simon Sinek did the Infinite Game, didn't he? Has he stolen it from there?
Ross:I don't know. James Curse wrote this book in the 80s.
Vicky:Exactly, yeah, amazing. Thank you, Of course thank you. Anything to add? No Good, nothing to add. Just um, I could have you know continued.
Sam:it's just been a real joy to do this with you, ross, thank you really nice to reconnect with you after a few years. So just remains for me to say thanks, ross, for for being with us, thanks to our listeners. Um, I hope you've enjoyed get amplified from the amplified group, as always, your comments and subscriptions are. For being with us. Thanks to our listeners. I hope you've enjoyed Get Amplified from the Amplified group. As always, your comments and subscriptions are most gratefully received.