EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Alright, welcome back to Things. Reasons. The Independent show for Australian IT leaders who want to hear what people actually think. We’ve got a pretty exciting episode ahead of us today. Sure do. Welcome Naran. Thank you. My co-host, fearless as always. 

What have you been up to this week?  

Uh, I’ve been to Tasmania recently. Um, now I am lucky in that I, I have a place there. My mother-in-law happens to live in it. Um. It’s probably unfair to say that we put her there specifically, but I know she’s very happy living there. I, I love going to Tasmania. I think it’s an awesome place. 

It’s always really rugged too. You drive around and you look up and the clouds and the wind and the weather and all the rest of it. You feel like you’re on an island in Tasmania and you go to these lovely gastro pubs. The food’s excellent. The locals are lovely. I don’t know. I like the place, there’s something about it. 

Love Tasmania. A little trip to Tasmania. Perfect.  

Yeah. What have you been doing?  

Mate, uh, I, I’m reliving my youth, my, my misspent youth. And, uh, I’ve been neck deep in building a Tamiya Hornet remote control car with my son.  

Oh my God. Yeah. That’s amazing. Yeah, and we  

got crazy on it. We put a hotted up motor in it. 

It does donuts in the dirt. And, uh, let me tell you, it’s way more fun than doom scrolling my LinkedIn feed. Who’s enjoying that more? You or Lockie? Look, I gotta say it. It could be me. It could be me. Uh, I’m ready to buy the next one. Alright, very good. Now look. Okay.  

Um, it would be remiss of me to not observe the fact that we have somebody else sitting here. 

Um, I’m gonna introduce this gentleman. So his name is Gustavo Fuchs, he works for Microsoft. He’s newly appointed. But he has worked for Microsoft before. Right now though, he’s the VP for Asia Channel Sales. Uh, he’s a 30 year veteran in technology. Previously led Google Cloud Solutions, and before that he was at Microsoft for 10 years 

I’m sure we’re gonna hear about that and why he went back. Um, he’s an Indeed or INSEAD graduate, uh, based in Singapore. Loves Singapore, uh, and he’s known for strategic leadership and inclusive tech ecosystems. Gustavo, welcome to Things. Reasons.  

Thank you so much for having me. Right. Well, what have you been up to? 

Well, um, back recently, now three months and a half. It does sound, um, much longer than that. Um, I actually been on the road. It’s my second or third time in Australia in three months. Right. Which is amazing. Again, thank you very much for having me. You’re welcome. So rejoining Microsoft after five years, uh, out there, uh, and. 

Very, very happy to be working with our channel partners across region. So I’m responsible for Asia, which includes everything from India, uh, to New Zealand. Yeah, so Australia, very, very important market for us. And I think there are mainly three reasons, uh, why I came back. I think one is, uh, we have an incredible opportunity. 

Microsoft has done so well, uh, across, you know, the many, uh, iterations we have. In terms of, you know, enterprise strategic customers, we always had a focus in small and medium businesses, and now we have an incredible setup, not only from a technology, but go to market and critical channel partners for us to do that. 

So the incredible opportunity for us, second is the customers we are working with, the partners we are working with. Um, they live through the real, what I call the real world. They are out there in the market. They go the up and downs of the economy. Yep. They are, the adoption of the technology is really critical for them. 

Makes a difference in the business. And then finally, I mean, I’m very happy to be back and working with many colleagues that, and leaders that I admire and, and know from before. So really, really good. It does, does sound longer than three months, just as a share of the intensity. Yeah. But it’s, it’s, it’s amazing. 

And again, thank you very much for having me here.  

You are very welcome. And look, can I just say that the five years between, um, your roles at Microsoft, my God, a lot has changed in that five years, right? Indeed. Incredible. Indeed. Indeed. Yeah. Does the, does the business feel different? Does Microsoft feel different? 

I think Microsoft has a very strong core, uh, that kept us, uh, not only going, but uh progressing throughout, but the company is much more agile. The company is much more inclusive. The company’s allowing itself to adopt and, and, you know, get the best of what we used to call the Silicon Valley. Bring this back to Washington state and of course, um, ex explore this and, and put this, the rest of of the world. 

I mean, if you remember many years ago. When Microsoft was adopting open source. Yeah. Today Microsoft is the biggest contributor to open source. Yeah. Right. Uh, many of the companies that we brought on board, be it LinkedIn, GitHub, many others, it created that concept of adding to the culture. And we see the company now being much more inclusive, much more agile, much more nimble, uh, to tackle many of those challenges and to help customers, uh, where they are. 

Not only where we are coming from in terms of our own set of beliefs. 

Yeah, I get it.  

Gustav, uh, did you really just come back to Microsoft because you wanted to be known as a Microsoft Boomerang? In Australia, we call people who leave and come back boomerangs.  

Well, it’s actually my third time in Microsoft Triple Boomerang. 

I dunno how to call that. Uh,  

I dunno what we call that one either. 

I would say my average tenure is 10 years. Okay. So I still have, you know, the next, next 10 years to go. And we do joke internally if, if there’s ever known, when you make 25 years in Microsoft, you get your name on a wall. Oh, cool. Back in one of the main buildings in Redmond, so I’m counting now 21 years and four months. 

So I have some time to go.  

Well look, we’ve got a lot of things to talk about. Uh, it’s fair to say, um, that the industry is going through a monumental change at the moment. Um, there’s ups and downs, there’s expectations, there’s concerns on return on investment. 

I’d say every, certainly mid-market business, maybe even every small business in Australia is wondering what the hell to do about this AI thing that’s kicking around. So why don’t we get stuck into that?  

I think we, I think we definitely should in terms of, uh, the agenda for Microsoft with AI, agentic AI uh, adoption of things like copilot and other technologies globally. 

How do you see that, uh, in terms of your role and how you are looking at the market through, through that lens of, of AI adoption? Are you seeing challenges, headwinds, tailwinds? What’s, uh, what’s happening there?  

I think the first thing is interesting to realise is that the new, I mean, AI is a technology and an area of focus for many decades. 

But the last wave with generative AI is three years old. Right? From since the announcement of chat GPT to now, we have been three years old. And even then, from the first iterations where we are now, we went very fast from models hallucinating to a world where we are now getting to start to get a lot of value from what we call agentic AI. 

So a lot of progress. And I think we will continue to see progress at even a, a larger scale. So not only people using com, people in companies using agents, but also they getting the benefits of agents to agents communicating. And I think, I think the, the harnessing of the technology, it’s really, really just, it’s the beginning in terms of the role we play and the role that our partners play to that is that Microsoft is a platform company. 

And it builds its platform. So partners can build capabilities, partners and customers can build capabilities on top. And with copilot as an example, we see this as, as the window for those companies to get the value from, uh, generative AI and from agents. There are a lot of things we’re going to be doing ourselves. 

So if you think about agents as you know, researcher, analyst. Those are basic capabilities we have.  

Yep.  

But the whole value of this for customers across segments will be on agents that get built on top. Yes. Some of those agents will be built by their own, uh, IT departments, by their own functions and with different levels of complexity from no codes to actually proper, very comprehensive agents. 

And some of them are going to be built by individual service providers as tailor major, major projects, or even from ISVs, right? Yes. So software companies are, are building on that. And our job, uh, working with channel, working with partners is to ensure that our customer needs are served by each one of those partner and partner types in each one of those ge, those geographies. 

Yep. So we have, um, a portfolio and that portfolio gets even better with the, the recent announcement we have of marketplace. Because not only now people have the way to monetise and drive adoption at scale, customers also have the capability to discover those agents, right? Yes. So think about it, you know, the challenges we had before in terms of installing, installing a, a mobile phone app mm-hmm. 

App stores helped us on that. Mm-hmm. We actually get into that now through marketplace and marketplace evolving to be an agent marketplace. Got it.  

So. Jono and I have spoken about this quite a lot over the last however many podcasts because it’s hugely topical. Um, and I imagine we’ll keep talking about it as an evolving story. 

Um, if I reflect on our business, um, within our business, we were lucky to have what we referred to as our mad scientists, and these are people with the right skills and background. They had software development capabilities and aspirations to explore the tech, but more importantly, we afforded them the free cycles and time to play with the technology against use cases that we knew were beneficial would be beneficial, I should say, should they be successful? And this is in the areas of things like back office automation. Sure. Now, some of these projects took six months plus. Um, they require, um, constant monitoring and vigilance and retraining, et cetera. 

So they’re a living, breathing thing now within our organisation. Why do I describe this the way I am? Um, I mean, we’re a tech business. We have the people, we afforded them the time and capabilities. I wonder how many businesses in Australia, um, have the same tools in their kit bag to achieve the same outcomes? 

Um, is there a skill shortage that’s gonna hold businesses up? Um, what is it that lends itself to these stats that we are hearing? That 95% of proof of concepts don’t make it through to production. I mean, that’s alarming, but yet our own experiences within our own business, we’re much more optimistic and successful. 

Yeah, I, I think, I think the pace of innovation is so fast that again, we are going from hallucination to POCs, uh, failing. To actually customers saving a lot of their, uh, costs and driving, uh, up upward in, in sales in a very short period of time. So I think there is an aspect of a news catching up to actually what’s happening on the ground. 

Yeah, we have seen many companies, service companies, uh, focusing very much on building agents, which then puts the demand. And we have ongoing, I actually even saw from this morning from our, uh, CEO of Microsoft commercial. More than 10, uh, reference cases post on LinkedIn of customers who are saving costs on customer care, driving new sales through automation. 

Yeah. Uh, addressing back office issues. I mean, any type of activity that requires repetition. Yes. And that requires deep subject matter expertise, which in many cases are also, uh, very, uh, common to have human mistakes. Those are prime cases for us to have agents working on our behalf. Yes. And that is, I think, a fundamental aspect, which probably also is key in terms of improving that ratio of success. 

Yeah.  

Is that every individual employee, especially at earlier in career, or very focused, be it an analyst or a researcher, they’re coming from a world where they do their job by themselves. And if you think about the ratio between things they come up with versus things they asked, the majorities are things they are being asked and all those functions we talk about, you know, jobs being eliminated. 

I like to think that jobs are now actually transitioning because those, uh, individuals in those very focused professions. They’re now actually becoming people leaders. Yes. The difference is that the people they are leading, the resources, they are leading. Those are virtual agents. Yes. Because they will be doing a lot of the hard work on their behalf and their productivity is increasing. 

So I would say the technology has come a long way and will continue to evolve, which hopefully helps on that percentage, but also the change management, how people should think about. Them doing their work and leveraging those agents in different ways Yeah. Will probably make the difference for us to get to a very high level of projects being successful and companies getting this level of result. 

So with that type of approach, which I, I agree with by the way, I think that’s the, the right approach, the, the idea that agentic AI adoption of that in a business can make a person more productive, more powerful. Where the AI now is working for that person, not necessarily replacing that person. And I know Naran and I have commented on this in the past, but there’s, there are instances where you see, I think organisations probably come at it from the wrong angle and start to look at this as a way to cut costs or. 

Reduced head count, and that’s backfired, uh, epically.  

Can we describe those organisations as evil Jono, or is that going too far, 

but accidental evilness. Oh yeah. Maybe super villain. You know, it, it, it’s cool to hear from a technologist just to say, you know, when you look at this, uh, technology here is an opportunity to make people better, not replace people. What, what are you seeing? Do you think there’s more of the market, looking at it through that lens, through the technologist lens or an an altruistic lens or the, the other lens, which is the maybe perhaps the, the ruthless business lens. 

I, I, I think the starting point may vary, right? Depending on what kind of pressures the companies are going through. Some pe some, some businesses are not profitable. Some businesses are not set up for long-term success. So they may see some of that technology as the silver bullet to solve their problems. 

Like a, like a life raft or, yeah, exactly. If they’re already in trouble. Yeah.  

I would say some others are in a more comfortable position and they see this as productivity gains, but I think in both cases what that will lead to, even if they have an initial perception that that will solve them and they will reduce drastically, it’ll get to a point where. 

Whatever is the number of contributors, they have, number of people in the business, those people will be doing more meaningful, more satisfactory jobs. Because I think one of the things, if we look at very specific, there are a lot of functions that people do that are not necessarily rewarding for the individuals. 

Yeah. Right. There is a lot of repetition. There is a lot of, uh, there is not new technology. The, the intellectual challenge is not there. So I think that’s sort of the other aspect that I personally believe that AI will make the jobs that people have more meaningful, more rewarding for them. Yeah. Because they will be able to do something that’s meaningful for the business, earn their living and all those things are important, but also have a, a constant development, self-development aspect on that because their activities are. Always improving, are always getting more interesting and complex. It, it, we don’t talk a lot about that, but potentially also it, it’s an incredible learning tool for individuals to do their jobs. 

Alright, well this is a good segue. Um, so not that long ago, um, myself and the team went to Chicago, um, for Ignite. Um, we’re gonna San Francisco, um, next month, November actually. True. Yeah. So we’re taking a small, small army of people there. 

Um, now the last time around it was all about fabric and data platform and embracing copilot for absolutely everything. Um, what can we expect at Ignite? In San Francisco next month.  

I dunno if I can give too much away of that. I mean, there’s a little, some, uh, surprise coming along, but I think what we have, um, what we have shared the beginning of our fiscal year, uh, internally and also with our partners through our M Cap start, uh, uh, event for partners Yep. 

Is that we have a very, uh, opinionated view of what we believe is the AI frontier firm. Right. Okay. So if you think about. All the frontier companies that have built their models, those are the companies that, uh, you know, started with ChatGPT, many others are building foundational models. 

They’re really changing, uh, how we think about, uh, technology and, uh, generative AI.  

So this is just for definition. So similar to a born in the cloud startup type business, this is born with AI.  

Exactly. Exactly. It’s, it’s the absolutely. So what, what we said. Startups, digital natives, frontier companies, uh, or companies that build foundational models are frontier companies. 

Yes. In the same way we said that every company will now become a software company.  

Yes.  

I think there is an opportunity now for every company to become a AI frontier company, and at the highest level, the opportunity is not only adopting technology. While maintaining their existing processes, which is what we went through in all the digitalisation way we had, but now is the opportunity to adopt the technology, but actually reinvent that business process.Right.  

You know, historically we took a paper form of, let’s say, set up in a new customer, which hopefully every business has that function of adding a new customer. And we took that from paper and maybe we put it on tablet or on some web interface. Now we have an opportunity of saying, Hey, maybe the way to add a new customer is different. 

Maybe I can use some, you know, common credentials. Maybe I can integrate this with other systems. Maybe AI can find some of this information for me. How do I make it easy for me to acquire those customers, not only in terms of the marketing efforts, but also for the customer to register themselves? Right? 

I mean, one of the. Points that I think there is still a lot of improvement is every time I wanna register for a service or a company, when I buy something, it does take some work, right? So how do I do that? And I think that’s the opportunity and that’s the blueprint of success. We will continue to iterate with our partners and with our customers how to become an AI frontier fee firm by redesigning your business processes, uh, from the ground up. 

Maybe killing some of them in the process. Yeah. ’cause you might not need the process in this new world. And also evolving your blueprint in terms of teams and functions within your company.  

How interesting. I think it’s a, it’s a noble endeavor. Definitely a noble endeavor. What, what is the big barrier to adoption? 

What’s what? So if you could snap your fingers overnight and solve one thing. That turns the tide right, that that sets everybody on an accelerated path to this outcome. What do you think it might be?  

I think AI is one of the technologies that has the fastest adoption cycles, right? If, if you think about all those consumer propositions, number of times to get to a million users or 10 million users, I think AI ChatGPTs probably gets, uh, the shortest period of time. 

If you look at you know, historically, radio, tv, internet. So I think we have a lot of momentum on our side. Fundamentally, we are asking people to work in different ways. We are asking them to change how they use technology. What do they do themselves, what do they delegate, uh, what kind of focus they put on daily activities. 

So I’m not sure if there is a snapping your finger and, and changing completely. It’s more about how we as technology companies make this an easier level of adoption. And I think if we focus on the most common use scenarios, so small and medium businesses, there are very common scenarios for every business in terms of onboarding and employee, uh, training people, uh, getting new customers, uh, making changes. 

If we can try to make those scenarios very uh, product oriented, we will ease the adoption and at the same time, the technology is evolving very fast. Mm-hmm. That will create the confidence with people, um, as we go along. Now, although there is no silver bullet, there are many things we need to take care of it. 

As we do that, security is very important, right. We are now, we, we are in the process of democratising information for every employee, every partner, every customer of a company. How do we do this with the right security levers? How do we do this in a compliant, a compliant manner? How do we make sure this is secure proof as this gets exposed? 

Right? So it’s, it’s that democratisation of information requires very important thinking on this. That’s one. Second is how do we, uh, create the right incentives in the system for teams and technologists to try? Right? So a lot of companies are averse to failure, I think. Failure now is, is, is, uh, there is no choice, but you need to be keeping, trying think new things in a smaller scale to get the right, uh, results. 

So, um, I do think we have a very fertile, uh, environment for us to, to try all those things and the technology is helping us address that. So, yeah. We are, I would say if we have this discussion 12 months from now, yes. I think we’ll be having a very different set of percentage in terms of, uh, um, projects being successful, number of projects, number of companies that 

see this as natural until we get to a point where it becomes a no brainer, right? Sure. I remember adopting a website or having an app on an app store was like, why should I do that? My business is B2B. Yes. Guess what? Nobody talks about this anymore. I believe we are 12 to 18 months far from that to make sure that everybody just is just the way people work. 

Alright,  

There’s a questtion, and I have to ask it because it’s fun to ask it. You know what I’m gonna talk about? I’m ready, I’m ready. I don’t know. So please go ahead. It’s the question on artificial general intelligence, right? It’s the question on, uh, where are we, how far away is that? Um, and. I’m wondering whether there’s some frustration in the market too, right? 

I I’m wondering whether there, the, the amount of investment in the market is in this anticipation of an artificial general intelligence type world, a new industrial age. Um, well, first question of you is, are we gonna get there? Have we arrived already? Do we have domain specific AGI? What’s your thoughts on that? 

Just an opinion.  

That one is a surprise. So, um, he choked on it. I, I, i, I, I don’t know if I fully align to the concept of artificial general intelligence. I think that’s the term that was coined. Uh, I believe some of the players in the market are very close to that. Um, what I, what I truly believe we are heading to is to a place where agents, co-pilots, um, chat bots, they will serve us more and more. 

Yes, and, and they will take all the, what I call thankless tasks. Of our day-to-day away from us. Yes. Hopefully making our jobs much more fun, much more meaningful to what we do. And for that to happen, which I think it’s on its way, there will be, needs to have general, foundation models that gives us some very let’s say broad knowledge, there will be need for some very specific, uh, models that are aligned and grounded to company information. Yeah. ’cause we are using this in the context of business world and equally important, there will be a need for all of those to communicate against each other. Yeah. Uh, to make sure activities are done. 

I’m, I’m with you, but I think we’ll be there and maybe a new term will come along. Right.  

Agents talking to agents. Yep. Is, is, is a, is a signal. That we’re on, that we’re on the path. That’s right. Jono. That’s what it sounds like.  

Think so? Yeah. I share your view and not to, uh, we need our tinfoil hats. Jono, do we have them? 

Some of their offices somewhere? I’m gonna make some, we’re gonna need to make some right here. Here’s what I think. Um, I think in order to have proper general intelligence, you need consciousness. I, I don’t think consciousness is an emergent property of the brain at all. Right? I think consciousness exists beyond. 

It’s the bottom of the pyramid. I think the physical world manifests out of it. This is going wild now. Right? You with me? I’m with you. Right. And so I think true intelligence as opposed to just strategically relevant responses to questions, right, is a different thing altogether. And I wonder whether we’ll ever get there and whether it’s possible to do so within the technology space whatsoever. 

Yeah, I think there is one step before that, and as a user, hopefully evolving to be a power user. Uh, which is very important, which is memory, right? I would love a lot to have a set of agents that truly understand how I think and can help me on my own way. Uh, we have technology today within copilot to help me write how I write. 

So that’s, I would say a first step. But can I go go to the next level, which I think it’s underway to make sure that it understands how I think about certain things, be it, you know, personal opinions, professional opinions. Sure. How do I write on LinkedIn? How, how do I do certain types of activities? Of course, with all the privacy in mind, but if I want to harness that technology and having that memory and association to me, I think that’s an important step before we get to that point, which eventually leads to conscious and, and I’m with you, I think, um. 

Yeah, there are a lot of other areas we should focus before that. I’m with you. Uh, that will lead to much more bigger gains in productivity. Mm-hmm. Than, uh, something that maybe we don’t understand yet what it means.  

So I think we can, I think, uh, AI can get a lot smarter before we get to general intelligence. 

We, that, that’s where we’re at. That’s right, Jono. There’s got a, it’s got a long way to go. Interesting take on memory, an agent building up a series of lived experiences to get to know you properly. Mm. I think that’s, uh, I like that, that that could be very interesting. Yep. Absolutely. Uh, that takes us to intrapreneurship. 

You wrote an interesting article recently on intrapreneurship and how to master it. We thought it was insightful. Give us, give our listeners the headlines on that. You know, why did you write it? What are your thoughts? What does it mean?  

Yeah, lemme take a step back on this. So I have a newsletter about intrapreneurship and the original motivation of the newsletter is that we talk a lot about entrepreneurship, right? 

So people starting their companies, people creating their ventures. But if I think about the number of people that will create their businesses versus people like us that work in businesses, uh, I think there is a big number of people that will work in businesses, but that doesn’t take away the fact 

that even though we are employees, if we have that entrepreneurial spirit, we can make huge differences for the business we work in. So that entrepreneurial activity inside a company can make a huge difference. And I couldn’t find, although it’s something I truly believe, I couldn’t find a good source, uh, that can give me tips and tricks and, you know, points of view. 

On how someone can operate sometimes in a small environment, sometimes in the complex environment with that. And that’s the original, uh, inspiration for me to create, uh, the intrapreneurship edge, which is, which is a newsletter. Uh, I think that’s cool. I have on, on, on LinkedIn and, and yeah, it’s very positive feedback. 

What I try to do is I live through a lot of experiences, um, as part of my day-to-day work. And not immediately because I will give away, but I have a, a, a backlog of uhhuh of those experiences that as I lived through, uh, I write some articles about it. Yes. And I think the most recent one I had was around, you know, coming new into a company or coming new into a role. 

It was the timeline of me, uh, getting close to my 90 days inside Microsoft, back at Microsoft. It, and it was a realisation that, you know, historically people used to say, oh, you need 90 days to start creating an impact to start sharing your opinion. Hmm. And guess what? In the same way, technology is evolving much faster. 

I don’t think the 90 days apply anymore, right? Yes. It’s an important milestone, don’t get me wrong. Uh, and maybe there are things you should be doing, uh, even further, uh, down from 90 days. But it’s very important that you start to create impact earlier if you’re new in a position, if you’re new into the company. 

Yeah, so that’s where I was covering some tips and tricks in terms of making sure you have the right connections with people, making sure that you’re not necessarily changing, uh, anything too fast, but you’re getting the different perspectives, right? Getting different perspectives. You’re being going to, if you’re a leader, joining a new company, you’re going to be exposed to a lot of needs, a lot of, uh, asks how do you make sure you get a 360 perspective from different stakeholders, from different points of view? Got it. That’s the essence of it. Uh, but you know, it’s, uh, there is no. There is no end goal here. We are all learning throughout, and hopefully that’s also beneficial. 

I’m pretty sure your approach, Jono, when you start a new job is to sort of ball your fists up like this and just rotate your  arms wildly as you go through the front door. Is that, is that  

Yeah. Having an impact? Yeah.  

Straight away.  

Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. I think, uh, I think that’s absolutely right. Any, any new employee in a business wants to have an impact. 

And you’re right, there’s a lot of resources out there for entrepreneurs, people who are starting new businesses, but there’s a lot of people out there who have the same spirit, the same mindset, their creativity working within organisations. I, I think that’s, I think that’s a very good thing. 

And they can benefit from everybody’s lived experiences. Yep. Certainly. Uh, it’s a good thing to share as well. What goes around comes around. And. I’d encourage our listeners to subscribe to your newsletter. We’ll drop a link that’s right to the newsletter in the post-production. Somebody will do something  

that we can put a link right there. 

Ding.  

Good job. There you go. That’s great. Yeah. Great conversation. Thank you. Um, speaking of lived experiences, and you’ve got, uh, a, a few of them, I think on, on your third tour at Microsoft now, plus some other interesting companies. What’s one piece of advice you’d give your past self before taking on a major? 

Tech initiative or challenge,  

it’s really around be careful what you wish for, huh? Um, I think, uh, when you get asked or when you get exposed to an interesting initiative, it’s very easy to get overly excited about that opportunity. Right.  

You wouldn’t know anything about that Jono? No. No. Not at all.  

24 7 manic episode. 

That’s right.  

Okay. So maybe that’s an episode by itself. Right. But I, I think, uh, being very grounded on, and it doesn’t necessarily mean changing the acceptance or not, because sometimes we find ourselves in situations where we are asked to do a project and we can’t say no. Right. If we are excited, we are never going to say no. 

Mm-hmm. Even if we are, have some reservations, we’ll definitely, uh, not be able in a position to say no, because that’s presented as an opportunity. But I think being grounded in understanding the upside and the risk, it enables us to be much more intentional on one, managing our own expectations, which goes a long way. 

But also making sure that we can navigate with the leaders, with the divisions, with the teams that have been asking us to do that. I think that’s very important. I have found myself in situations where I was offered a project, I got overly excited and I missed many of the potential risks of that, and I only saw those risks when they were potentially too late. 

Mm-hmm. And sometimes we, you are in an environment where there is, um, accommodation for risk. Sometimes you find yourself in an environment that, that, that appetite for risk may not be there. But if you are intentional, if you are aware of that, that helps a long way and you can mitigate, uh, any risks and potentially even increase the odds of success of that project. 

Before anybody else realises that was a risk in the first place. So  

true. So many parallels with sales, uh, and I think it comes down to an abundance mindset there. There are always more projects, there are always more opportunities. And not all businesses, good business and not all projects are good projects. 

Absolutely. But when you’re excited about it, it’s hard not to be excited.  

Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. I think, uh. You know, in a vendor word, it’s very common to say, oh, we got an RFP, we should answer. Yes. And I think the question I try always to ask is, why? Yeah. Is it written for us? Yes. Did we have, did we help write it? 

Mm-hmm. Uh, do we have any chances of providing any value? Mm-hmm. Uh, so I think it do, it doesn’t mean that we’re not going to answer, right. But it just means that we are intentional and we are thinking about it because again. There is more work than time. There are more projects, as you said, than what we can do. 

So, uh, I think that intentionality, uh, maybe it comes a bit with gray hair, but uh, it goes a long way because battle, battle scars. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Muscle memory, right? Yeah. Alright. Okay.  

Speaking of which, so this will be the second of our quickfire three questions. Uh, this one is in relation to tech leadership. 

So my question to you is, what’s something that you used to believe in, in tech leadership that you no longer do?  

I don’t know if it’s tech, leadership or just leadership in general. Sure. Um, and maybe this is a function of wanting to get things done. Historically, I believed in achieving targets Yes. 

And beating targets. And I missed a lot of the joy and probably made a lot of people miss the, the, the joy of progress throughout.  

So, let’s say, you know, in many companies you have quarterly and yearly targets, right? And you fix yourself in achieving that yearly targets and you miss the opportunity to. 

Enjoy, learn and celebrate by yourself with others, the progress throughout. Yes. So I try to concentrate that much more now on progress. So when I have a discussion with the team is I try to look less aware our yearly targets are, but you know, week over week, month over month, what did we make progress? 

Mm-hmm. What are we proud of? What should we celebrate, what we should learn from? Mm-hmm. Did we have fun? Right? I mean, the number of hours and in, I think in technology broadly, it’s not only Microsoft, but the market and the industry in general. And many of our customers, the number of hours we put are out of this world. 

Mm-hmm. I mean, no one works at eight hours. It’s probably between, it’s like what, uh, Jensen from Nvidia says is that I work 24 hours. When I’m not working, I’m thinking about work. That’s right. When I’m, when I’m sleeping, I’m waking up thinking about work. Yeah. Right. So I think having joy and looking at the, the progress, the journey is much more important than the goals. 

And what I have at least seen and maybe being lucky or not on that, is that by thinking this way, the odds of you actually getting and beating those targets at the end. A much higher Yeah, because you re-energising yourself and others. Yeah. As part of that journey, you get buoyed by the progress as you go as well. 

And we speak about this, right? And sales tends to have momentum, right? Jon? Like a seller who gets a couple of wins under their belts, probably very likely to have a couple more. Right? And if you celebrate that along the way, then maybe you’ll, you’ll get to the quarter, the half, the full year result. And you’ve enjoyed the journey along the way. 

Absolutely. Absolutely.  

Yeah, I’m down with that. It’s no different to look training for any sport. I’m a keen cyclist. I mean, we don’t wanna bang on too much about that on the show, uh, per se. Maybe a little bit, little bit.  

But, but you know, you get to enjoy the training along the way. Right. And like the big races at the end or wherever they are in the year, they’re just the end of a process that you’ve already bought into you and you enjoyed. 

Right. For me, it’s probably 90% of it’s about the training because, you know, that’s what makes me feel good. And you’re right too about. The job being, and we’ve spoken about this in the past as well, it’s a lifestyle choice. Yeah. For many of us. Right. We don’t stop thinking about it. You think about it in the shower, on the drive to work or wherever, you’re always thinking about it. 

So you know, if you’re not enjoying that, God help you ’cause it’s occupying all of your mind. 

Gotta try and have some fun. So it sounds like the thing you used to believe was that you, uh, didn’t need to pause and celebrate the small wins. It’s become apparent that that’s actually really important. Mm-hmm. 

Indeed. Great advice. What’s your gut check for spotting a, a good partner and maybe that’s code for given you are from Microsoft, uh, which are the best partners who gets all the leads? Tell us the secrets our audience needs to know.  

Might be one  

of them here today, but  

so I’m married for 23 years, so I think I have a good. 

You know, hunch about choosing partner. Okay, good. Right. Okay. Uh, so maybe that’s the start. Uh, but I think, and, and that probably goes from personal life to professional life. Partnerships need to be win-win, and win-Win means you need to get value out of it. I need to get value out of it. There will be compromises you make. 

There are compromises we, we make. And sometimes, uh, we miss that point, you know, big technology companies, they may have their own way of doing business. Uh, but even in that case, I think there should be levels of accommodation on what is the value the partner is bringing, what’s the value that the vendor is bringing? 

If we think about the traditional relation of vendors and partners and, and, and, and technology. Yeah, if I see anything that goes too much tilted from one side or another, um, I think it’s a recipe for not a durable partnership. It can still be a partnership, but not durable. I mean, if you think about, you know, market news, that is a vendor that has changed completely their partner program, and the most common thing I hear is that, oh, this vendor has changed the partner program. 

Uh, we are looking to migrate. Right. So they’re still partners. Hmm. It doesn’t mean it’s a durable partnership anymore. Yeah. So I think, uh, I always keep this as a as as way as we going through our own evolution of partnerships in Microsoft. Are we doing things that enable durability of our partnership? 

Are we enabling our partners to be successful? And yes. There will be times where we need to make changes. Some of those changes, we’re going to be first because we have seen something that the market has not seen yet. Some of those changes we’re going to be doing as a market reaction. But the key point is not the change itself, but how does that change pans out over time? 

Yes, right, because we want to have durable partners. We don’t want to do this for six, eight months or 24 months. It’s a long way, and, and I think it’s something that, broadly speaking, Microsoft does very well. Because if you think about the, the DNA of the company starting from, you know, pc, OEM partnerships to having the biggest ecosystem with more than, uh, half a million partners globally, uh, I think we get more things right than we get things wrong. 

Yeah, nobody’s perfect, but, uh, uh, I I, it’s something, it’s very, very important in the back of my mind to make sure that. If we are changing something, what is compensating to do that? And, and we are con continuously evolving on those partnerships. 

I like that. Jono, I’d lucky for you and I, our wives don’t listen to this podcast ’cause all this talk about compromise could be distracting. 

But listen, great advice. Advice. Great advice. Advice. Yeah. Excellent. Alright, well listen, Gustavo, thank you very much for coming on Things. Reasons. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. A really, really good conversation. Amazing. 

Thank you so much.  

 All right. That’s a wrap. Big thank you to Gustavo.  

I think a very insightful conversation. Loved his, uh, take on the quickfire three. Yes.  

Around partnership being a win-win and Microsoft’s approach to that. Yep. He had some interesting takes on AI as well, and I know you pushed him pretty hard.  

Look, I like to, I mean, everyone has an opinion on this space. 

It’s an exciting space. Who knows where it’s going. He’s come back for more at Microsoft and he’s come back at a time when Microsoft are going through an incredible amount of change and they’re trying to speculate just as much as everybody else and where this. Thing is going so credit to him. I know I put him on the spot, but he answered the questions and um, you know, hopefully our audience found that interesting. 

I know I did.  

Yeah, hugely interesting to see where things are going. Very insightful conversation. Mm. Looking forward to the next one’s. It’s good right to have great guests.  

It is, and we’ve got a whole string of them coming up, so I would say audience, stay with us please. We’re grateful that you are continuing to watch the show. 

Please subscribe. We watch the numbers meticulously and when they increase, we’re super happy about it. This is of course Things. Reasons. uh, and you can find us anywhere you get your podcast, apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube. We’re gonna be plastering the show all over LinkedIn. Good luck avoiding us. And we are of course produced by Pru Loon. 

Our digital producer is Karina Aguilera, and if you have questions or feedback or absolutely anything, please email us at pru@thingsreasons.show. And that’s a wrap. Thank you.  

That’s a wrap. Thanks everybody. See you again next time.