You don't fail when you make the wrong decision.

You fail when you make the safe one.

That's the part that no one prepares leaders for.

When everything is on the line and

certainty never shows up, you're going to

have days where it doesn't feel like you move forward at all.

You have to continue to stay positive and do the next right thing.

Those are the days that leaders don't talk about.

The days that pulling the plug on the business feels responsible.

If it was easy, everyone would do it.

And the most rewarding things in life are the things that aren't easier.

That's Jed Ayers, now CEO of ControlUp.

And his story forces a question that every leader eventually faces.

When everything is on the line, what

are leaders actually getting wrong?

Why massive decisions rarely feel clear when they matter most, what leaders misread during long stretches of uncertainty.

And the real risk most leaders don't

recognize until it's too late.

I'm Ben Fanning and this is Lead the Team.

Stick around.

Welcome back to Lead the Team.

I'm your host, Ben Fanning and this conversation that you're going to hear is meant to challenge, inspire and ripple out.

It's not just a podcast.

It's a positive movement to build better leaders.

And you can help by taking just 10 seconds to rate and follow on Apple, Spotify and YouTube and drop a quick review over on Apple.

This helps more bold leaders discover the show and keeps the mission alive.

Enjoy.

Jed Ayers, CEO of ControlUp.

Welcome to Lead the Team.

Thank you so much, Ben.

It's great to be here.

Jed, back in your days at Igel,

you led one of the most dramatic transformations in tech, driving over 600% revenue growth in three years and taking the company to a billion dollar valuation.

Now, when leaders hear that story, they assume there was a moment where you knew the bet was going to work.

Kind of like the good to great book.

You get this flywheel spinning, right, and it starts to take a life its own, right?

It was a lift.

It was some of the hardest things you can do in the world of tech.

Hardware to software.

Perpetual a subscription.

Bringing a German tech into the United States, into the largest companies in the world.

I mean, what, what's your tip for helping leaders get the dang flywheel going?

Yeah, it's like the next right thing, right?

It's having your right, the right priorities, being focused and executing and getting up and doing the hard work and.

And you know you're going to have days where doesn't like feel like you move forward at all.

And I think you have to just sort of continue to sort of stay positive and, you know, do the next right thing.

And probably most importantly, you have to believe, right?

You got to believe that you can actually achieve whatever it is you're set out to do, right?

And get the people around you to believe.

Yeah, man.

That puts you on the tech Rushmore right there, you know, with that giant thing in three years, how did you and your team celebrate?

We actually started doing an event every year where we would bring everyone together from the whole end user compute community and it was called Disrupt.

That was probably the biggest celebration, right?

Was just sort of bringing thousands of people together under one tent and, you know, discussing not only how, how we got there that year, but also what we were still planning on doing.

Right.

And so, yeah, I'm a, I'm still a big believer, Ben, of humans are best served when they're not looking at each other through a zoom camera, but actually breaking bread.

Oh, man.

Love that, man.

Well, now that you're at control up, are you trying to pull off another transformational like that?

I joined ControlUp and it's an equally stunning opportunity, right?

It's a disruptive moment in time, as we all know with AI and while it's not the lift from a hardware to software, it's this opportunity to kind of take a company that did great things around observability and monitoring and remediation and intersect that into an autonomous endpoint management, autonomous it.

And so, yeah, this is a very exciting moment for a company like ControlUp.

Right?

And so, and that's going to be based on moving into this autonomous endpoint management space.

When you, so when you make these moves in your career, are you obviously like you get approached or they say, hey Chad, we need you in our company, I'm guessing at some degree, but are you, you're looking at the industry, you're looking at the potential roi, or you can make a difference?

Like what is.

You know, I'm just curious how you filter through these opportunities and decide whether to stay put and sort of ride the opportunities there or to make another move and start rebuilding.

I think as a CEO, when I look at it, the first thing is really about the technology, right?

And how big of a mark you can leave an event you can leave on the universe, right.

And so in this particular case, I've been an end user compute for 30 years and I looked at this new exciting category that ControlUp was in, right?

Digital employee experience, and you're like, okay, this is almost like this customer experience revolution of sort of the mid 2015s or whatever, when everyone started to really uplevel the investment there.

As hundreds of millions of people went home and are working from home today, there's this realization that, hey, we really need to prioritize employees experience.

And so that was part of it for me.

But I think as a CEO, you also have to look at a lot of other factors, right?

The, the makeup of the, the board, the, you know, the financial construct, the growth construct.

Just, you know, what are the levers that I personally can bring to the table to help the company succeed, right.

And is there a match there?

So, yeah, all of that really came into focus for me at Control up, right.

It was great tech, great people, you know, a huge opportunity.

And then as AI has come into focus, it's become even more obvious that this is, you know, hey, wow, we collect a lot of data and Ben, we collect 10,000 metrics every three seconds on individual employees, kind of their digital footprint, right?

As it's, as it's developing that level of data intersected with these AI models, it's going to produce some profound results in terms of redefining how you can manage these experiences with less people, less trouble tickets.

It's actually kind of astounding, right?

40 years of stacking more and more tools and throwing people at it and this endless sort of hamster wheel of trouble tickets.

We have this opportunity with this tech to sort of radically change that.

Well, the digital experience for most employees is terrible because it's a mess and you just want to do your job like I'm not.

I have my own business now, but I worked in corporate for decades and I want my technology to help me do my job, not prevent me from doing it or give me a bunch of other gobbledygood to deal with.

What's the big stat that you think would shock a lot of CEOs or other leaders right now about how big, how bad it is for companies?

Well, I think when they realize the productivity drain, right.

There's some studies out there that show, you know, there's thousands of dollars worth of productivity drain.

And I think in certain industries, Ben, like healthcare, where you see people waiting, you know, five minutes to log into their system and they, they have to log in many times across the course of the day, there's just a lot of sort of pain that people have, will, will take without ever really even doing anything about it.

We see this especially in frontline use cases, right?

Retail, healthcare, financial services, where they don't even really have time to go open that trouble ticket.

They just complain to each other, right?

Like, wow, this is terrible.

I should go work at a different hospital down the road where they have better IT services.

Right?

So this, I think, is probably the hidden cost of what you're talking about, Ben.

Right.

Is that people.

And then they also start to do workarounds, right?

They.

They bring in other tech, they bring in shadow.

It becomes a thing.

Right.

And then you have.

Yeah, they download their own app that's not approved.

Just because I think it works better.

Exactly.

You know, leaders got to think about this because, I mean, this is like the big thing around healthcare and benefits.

Like that's a differentiator for people to stay at your company.

But if they don't understand their benefits or know how to access them easily, they don't see it as a benefit.

So it's like you're throwing all that money out the door.

And I love how you've prioritized this.

Now, a lot of people listening today may know Jed like the superstar transformation guy, but they may not know about your former boutique hotel and your wine tour company that you, like, ran for.

It started for like 15 years.

I want to hear, like, why in the world did you get in the first place?

What was that like?

And are you just trying to recreate the customer service of boutique life on a digital framework for employees at ControlUp?

Yeah, I don't usually talk too much about it, Ben, because you don't see too many, you know, software, tech, CEOs with a hospitality background.

But like I was telling you, yeah, I've gone through the school hard knocks.

I put myself through school and I was always involved in hospitality, doing that.

And I actually was a dishwasher.

Was my very first job, actually at the hotel that I went home to, my hometown in Northern California.

And that was my very first job was at this property.

So I, I had this fantasy after the dot com meltdown that I would, you know, go raise my family and kind of like the Hallmark movies, right?

Like the guy leaves the big city and goes back to the small town.

And so, yeah, I, I spent four full years just, you know, re energizing this beautiful property in, In.

In a town called Mendocino.

Mendocino, yeah.

Beautiful town, by the way.

It was a little bit of a deviation, but, you know, as I started to see, you know, mobile phones, and I think it was right around 2005, 2006, I realized I better get back into this tech world or it's gonna Run away from me.

But it was an amazing experience.

Right.

In terms of, you know, just a whole different, you know, taking something that I had grown up around and used to put myself through school and, you know, reconnecting with my hometown.

You know, when I took the place over, it had six employees.

When I left, it had a hundred.

And it was a.

It was an amazing.

It became one of the largest employers in the town.

And it was a.

It was a fun experience.

It was a lot of work.

And I like the gross margins of the software business a lot better than the restaurant business.

You.

It's a hard business, isn't it?

It is, but rewarning and.

Yeah, to your point about, you know, just dealing with people and understanding the general public and serving them, you know, there's a lot to be actually taken from that.

Yeah.

If you did.

If you could just share one tip or one strategy used back in your Mendocino boutique hotel wine tour days for.

For leaders, what.

What would it be?

Yeah, Well, I think I come to.

In a world where everybody's in the selfie mode and it's me, me, me, there is a.

A sort of mindset around what I call, you know, people talk about servant leadership, I talk about a servant heart.

It's a certain orientation where if you can, you know, serve the employees and the people that you're the team you're working with, and you kind of look for how you can serve them and by extension, your partners and then, of course, your customers.

Right.

Like that.

If you can sort of figure out how to think like that, especially as a leader, I think that that can serve you very well, especially in a world where people are kind of toppling over each other in the me first generations.

So I think that's a ethos I live by.

Ben, is just sort of this servant orientation.

And in anticipating needs right, where you can see great service, that's what it's about.

Right.

It's about anticipating things before they actually.

Someone even thinks they need it.

Right.

And so I think those are parallels that you can find from the service industry.

Yep.

So, so good.

So many good lessons in there.

And it's so easy in tech to sit in your office, make things happen on the screen, but forget about the user experience.

And of course, that's what your company is all about, right.

Is the user experience.

When you talk to your.

You've been talking to employees about this for a long time.

Is there one thing that you tell them or story that you tell them that makes that really resonate with Them or that.

You see, hey, when I say this or do this, it really helps shift them to think more about the customer.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's the adage of, like, you got to put yourself in the customer shoes.

And I think we see this in tech.

Actually.

Some of the best CIOs I know will actually go to the front lines, right?

And you, you see some of the breakthroughs that even the biggest companies in the world have, like Starbucks, right, when the CEO goes and spends time on the front lines and they see some of the problems and inefficiencies for themselves, right?

And so I think that's part of what we try to do, right, is we sell to it.

We sell to the end user, compute decision maker.

And so we're constantly spending time with those decision makers trying to understand, where are the kinks and the hoes, how can our product revolutionize how they think about doing things?

And I think that's how you leave your mark in this world, right?

We're all here for a short period of time, so you want to have the biggest impact.

And, and for us, I think that the biggest thing is go spend time with your customers, right?

And, you know, we, we do customer councils here and you just, you know, you also need to go see them, as hard as it is to get on plane and go, you know, spend time with them in their, in their environments.

I think this is from an experience perspective.

There's no better way.

Garner what they're going through, man.

Love that perspective.

Now bringing it forward a little, or I guess we're taking it back.

And again to, to Igel.

So you're, you're sort of let you have a legendary story about commissioning a documentary film for your own company and also giving away a Tesla.

What, Where, Why in the world do those two things?

And what was the result of those two iconic Jed moments in terms of what, like,

it was pretty funny joining a German company, right, where they're very into cars and, you know, I went to them and said, hey, I have this crazy idea.

Let's give away, you know, the fastest, safest, smartest car in the world.

And there was this distinct parallel to this operating system that we were selling, right?

But then trying to convince them that the safest, smartest, fastest car in the world wasn't a German car, but it was actually one made in California by Tesla.

But that turned out very well, right?

Like, this was early in the days of Tesla when people wanted to, you know, pet them and they couldn't believe that they were beating these, you know, your petrol cars, right?

So we got a lot of attention and ended up, you know, where, you know, people would take a demo with us and we made this parallel.

So that, that was, that was a super fun campaign and it got a lot of attention and you know, there was a distinct parallel between the two.

And yeah, the, the second question that you asked, I guess is, was about the documentary.

You.

I guess I, I truly believe that in the power of video, right?

No one wants to read a long, dense white paper.

No one reads anything anymore, right.

They have a 12 second tension span.

So one of the things that was a weird, serendipitous moment was a friend of mine who was actually a pretty legendary Emmy winning documentarist, worked for National Geographic, had done a lot of really high level filmmaking.

He showed up at my doorstep in San Francisco one day and said, hey, I'm unemployed, I'm kind of looking for my next thing.

And I thought, wow, this is a unique storyteller.

And I actually hired him and he ended up working for me for five years and we just took him everywhere with us, right?

And he learned the industry, he learned to ask the right questions.

And yeah, I would just tell you like it was amazing how, how powerful that was and it helped spin the flywheel right where you would, at every event we would have him and he would, he would capture these amazing statements from our customers and well, it may seem expensive and kind of crazy to hire someone like that.

You know, sometimes those type of things that are just the non standard out of the box.

And yeah, there's, there's a great 20 minute video that he built about, you know, making the impossible possible at Igel.

And he did a great job of kind of as you see these, you know, really good documentaries, all the voices of the people that over the years that made the impossible possible.

And yeah, so I, I guess the, the message to your audience is don't ever underestimate the power of video, right?

And, and getting your story told, Whether it's 20 minutes or 20 seconds, it's how people consume things today.

Are you looking to increase sales, grow your brand and share your leadership message?

Then check out our business podcast program.

Each week more people listen to podcasts than have Netflix accounts.

And one third of the US population listens to podcasts regularly.

So your customers and team are already listening to podcasts.

It should be yours.

Discover our five step profitable podcast framework and what results you can expect for your company by setting up a 20 minute call with my team@BenLeads.com schedule.

That's BenLeads.com schedule.

Where did you see that show up in?

Helping get the flywheel going internally, externally.

It was amazing.

Like, I'll give you just like one, one example, Ben, there we, you know, the best rep, he would take these videos and he would literally just send them to, you know, CIOs of, of companies that were in the same industry, like, hey, listen to this guy.

And the result he's getting that.

And that was just.

The entire video was a lit, you know, or a email was a link, you know.

And then all of a sudden he was just telling me like, you're not going to believe how many meetings I've gotten from this, right?

And, and how people react to this.

It's, you know, hearing their own peer and it's not some really long, drawn out, like, fancy thing.

It's literally a guy on the trade fl, you know, show floor speaking into the value he was getting.

Right?

And so, and, and by the way, people overcook these, you know, customer testimonials, right?

They got to go get approvals and they want this huge, you know, fully cooked thing, right?

We would just get an off the cuff, you know, less than two minute statement, right.

And, and then we would run with it.

So that's the kind of like scrappiness that I think you can get with video and you don't have to, it doesn't have the production value, doesn't even have to be perfect, right.

It's just capture the moment.

And in this world, you, you see, see the most viral videos in the world, they're not edited.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I, I love that.

There's a realness, there's a rawness to it.

And as AI continues to make these things easier, they come out, as you say, overcooked, over polished, weird sometimes.

And just the real voice of the real person can really make a huge impact.

And that's honestly, that's for lead the team at our show, the hundreds of CEOs we've had on.

I mean, that's what it is.

It's their story.

Long forum.

Yeah, I guess.

And it's funny because you kind of think about like I mentioned like our customer council that we had that we host, right?

You bring a video guy to that, it's like, yeah, you capture 15 people that are highly invested in your company and it's just like, okay, you got all signs of content that you're able to use, right?

Like the ability to use things over time too.

And you know, we're doing a kickoff.

Okay.

Wow.

Some of that content is very energizing for our whole employees to sort of put it into a high impact reel.

So, yeah, video, video, video.

I think it's, it's so important in this sort of TikTok Instagram world we live in.

Are you, do you have a vision for merging that into your platform for employees and helping companies use that more effectively?

I think our platform is really more about when people are watching video or they're in a high fidelity video unified communication exchange like the one we're having right now, that they're flawless.

Right.

And you don't get the sort of packet loss and hey, you sound like a robot or I can't watch this video.

Through this autonomous experience platform that we're building.

You have the, you know, sort of, the, the vision here is so that, you know, you, you, you, you never experience that sort of productivity drift that you, you, you have the, the data being collected and, and recalibration of, of things that are causing a deficiency in your experience without you ever even having to, to know about her.

Yeah.

One of the things I'm pointing out here is I can tell you're a fan of the power of storytelling.

And I think in tech especially it's hard because people don't relate to all the technical terms.

They relate to the impact the tech will make.

And sometimes they're like way upstream.

And I think this is a skill that a lot of leaders really could embrace to tell their narratives a lot more.

I was very lucky early on in my career.

I went to an event and so many of these tech events are just the same thing over and over again.

Right.

Very dense slides, feature function, you're put to sleep, basically.

And there was a guy who I met early in my career who was actually kind of a famous storyteller.

He would go to these events and he would sort of break the third wall on all that sort of techno mumbo jumbo.

And he would, he would tell these highly emotional stories.

And so I became quite good friends with him and I sort of learned something through that, which was people don't remember anything other than one how you make them feel.

Back to our servant heart stuff, but also stories, right?

Those are the two sticky things in life.

And so, yeah, the features and functions, no one's ever going to remember that.

Right.

But if you put it in the context of a story about how, you know, Ben used this technology in his, you know, in a real world setting and you, you have a sort of narrative Arc to that.

Those are the things that people are going to remember.

And if you can personalize it, that will make it that much stronger.

Right.

And I found it to be totally true, right.

Like, you know, I would tell stories at these kickoffs or, you know, big events we would do.

And, you know, a year from now, no one remembers them, but, hey, they remember a story I told them about, you know, growing up on an apple farm, right.

Like, that's the stuff they remember.

And so I think as a leader, if you can find ways to, you know, run away from the.

The features and the functions and, and align with people's hearts and minds, it's a thousands of year, you know, around a fire, kind of, you know, human thing.

Right.

We tell stories and that's how things are passed through generations.

Right.

It's.

It's not marketing fluff.

It's really actually leadership.

Right.

And it's hard to do.

It's easy to regurgitate features and functions.

Right.

It's actually much harder to.

To tell a really powerful story.

Do you spend a lot of time working through stories and how you're going to share the narrative?

Like, do you write them down or do you use your.

I do, and I think it will serve you well.

Like, the coach that I was telling you about that I kind of became great friends with, you know, he's like, you need to have a carousel of stories that kind of align with your leadership values, and you need to be able.

I mean, it's kind of a.

Some people that are sticking with you for decades probably get sick of hearing those same stories.

But, you know, there's.

There's a real power to her.

Yeah.

I.

It's like how to get too good at telling a story.

Well, you tell it over and over and over and you watch the reaction.

And y'.

All, if you're a leader of a team, that's a good, good way.

I like it.

That's a.

That's a captive audience in your staff meeting, right.

Tell them the story of a customer.

Tell them the story, and if it falls flat and they're checking their phones, keep working on it.

Exactly.

I mean, I think you can tell.

It's interesting.

We.

I've had some great storytellers, you know, speak to groups and what.

One thing you can see right away is that people that tell stories, the phones don't come out and people aren't checking their email.

Right.

They're.

They're really tuned in people.

Yeah.

They have a.

An ear for it.

Right.

It's just Part of how we are as humans, man, I love that.

Well, we gotta.

I got a couple more questions here.

But.

But we're starting to run out of time and I gotta ask about the Iron man stuff because you do this, you run the iron.

I mean, I've never run one.

I know it requires a lot of mental resilience and all that, but the thing that.

And I want to know about that, but I also want to know.

You got to train for those things, right?

You gotta, you gotta put in a lot of hours before you ever get to the Ironman to be able to complete it.

And you're running a really intense company, high profile role.

What.

How many hours a week are you training and what is the ROI that you get out of those training hours that makes you better at work?

Well, to be clear, Ben, I don't want to mislead your audience.

I haven't done one in a few years just because of some of the challenges of the, of running a global company.

But I did do six between 2010.

Okay, six in a row.

That's respectable.

Even doing one is impressive.

And you know, I did quite a few ultra marathons in that same time frame.

So.

Yeah, what I would tell you is it teaches you a lot about yourself.

Right.

First of all, most humans that are listening, you know, probably think it's unfathomable.

But what I would tell you is the human body and the human brain is capable of a lot more than you may think.

Right.

And the Iron Man, I think, is a great example of that.

Right.

Where you're.

Yeah, you may not be able to run five, five miles today, but you can do an Iron man, right.

Like it's, it's possible.

You just have to put your mind to it.

And.

Yeah, yeah, it is a, a great study of like, time management, attention to detail.

There's a lot of details that just go into prepping, you know, for these transitions and these different activities that you have to do and fueling yourself for.

For, you know, four hours on a bike and, and all that.

So I think, you know, it's a, it's a great study and sort of like, you know, they call it an endurance athlete.

And I think, you know, the parallel in business is.

Yeah.

That it is an endurance.

It's an endurance sport.

Right.

Like you, you have good years, you have bad years, you have good quarters, you have bad quarters.

Right.

And you got to take something out of those moments.

And the same's true when you're swimming, biking, running.

Yeah, you're going to have moments of, of glory and moments of pain and you got to push through it.

I always tell my kids, right.

Like, you know, if it was easy, everyone would do it.

And you know, you got to put your pain in a box, right.

And, and, and you'll, you'll, you'll be better for.

And so I think, yeah, there's a lot to take from that.

I will say when you wake up at 3:30 in the morning and you're raising four kids and you're working a 11 hour time zone difference and oh, they work on Sunday through Thursday in Israel where you know, a lot of my employees are today, it makes it a lot harder.

But what I will say is that when I am in a routine and I'm still running almost every day, that time that you take to clear your head, I always find I come back and I'm like, okay, I, you know, I've been able to process things and you know, I think everybody needs to have that outlet right.

Where they aren't glued to their screen or their phone and they're out getting fresh air and you know, opening their mind up.

Because yeah, you, some of your best ideas come in those moments, not when you're bearing down on in front of a screen.

Yes.

So many good nuggets in there.

And I'm constantly reminding myself like exercising, even taking a walk, that's not unproductive time.

Exactly.

And that can be part of your productivity.

Like you don't, you know, there's like a, I think some people feel guilty like I can't leave, I can't do this, I can't.

You know, but having those things balanced and integrated in a way that help can help, help fuel you and help you sustain yourself.

Yeah.

And I love, I loved your thing about people talk about being resilient, but a few people talk about how to be resilient.

You're like, put the pain in a box, right.

What I hear is like also like compartmentalize sometimes like integrate your, your work life and your professional life where you can.

But they're going to be times where you do have to sort of bear

down and go and be able to always be easier.

I tell the story of when I was, had the hotel actually.

There was a guy who, who I actually bought, bought a property from as part of the hotel.

And it was this older guy who, he was probably in his 80s and I would, I would, I run into him, um, and he was really rooting for me and the, and you know, the work I was doing and he was this old guy who didn't say a whole lot, but he would, when he did say something, it was you know, usually pretty, pretty brilliant.

And I would pass him in the street going to the post office and he would tell me, you know, he kind of glint his eye would say, jed, if it was easy, everyone would do it.

And that was like his words of encouragement to me.

Right.

And so whenever I kind of get boxed into a corner and I'm thinking like the sky is falling, I always think of this sort of sentiment.

Right.

That.

Yeah, it's true.

Right.

If it was easy, there'd be, there'd be, everyone would do it.

Right.

So.

Yeah.

And the most rewarding things in, in life are the things that aren't easy.

Yeah.

And it's not just because.

Yeah.

It's not because it's just magic.

It's like, hey, when we invest ourselves, we invest our money, our time.

It makes things, makes those things worthwhile.

We don't.

If you give, if it's something comes easy and it's just free to you, it's just harder.

It's human nature to find.

Harder to find the value in that.

Exactly.

Long term.

So starting to swing this back around to which are you going to control up?

I had to talk about digital employee experience.

And we do that.

We start thinking about.

Some people might be thinking about words like monitoring and surveillance of employees.

Well, hey, control up.

And these guys, they just want to like monitor what the employees are doing, how many keystrokes they're doing, how long they're in front of their computers in a digital world.

And how, how do you see

the

digital employee experience and sort of like the surveillance, Making people, you know, making sure.

Yeah.

So there is a very distinct difference, Ben.

And I'm happy to tell you there are a few companies that, you know, that do specialize in this sort of like, you know, digital monitoring.

And I, and I will tell you, it's kind of funny because like the analysts and the teams that like Gartner that follow this, that they're like, it's like a third rail in a way.

Right.

There is an industry there.

There's some, a few companies that do it and you know, they, they probably, you know, are serving a purpose in certain industries and certain use cases.

But that is not at all what we do.

Right.

We're, we're really the, the personal information and the sort of like surveillance for, you know, kind of disciplinary actions or whatever.

We have nothing to do in, in that area.

Right.

Our, our whole ethos is like we want to make it better for employees from a productivity perspective.

Right.

And so all the personal information, what they're doing, where they're doing it, how long they're doing it, that's completely abstracted from our platform.

And it's about, you know, where there might be friction and degradation based on networking, based on, you know, hardware application, you know, anomalies, seeing those anomalies and then being able to intersect them in a way that fixes them, hopefully without anybody having to inter.

Be involved.

Right.

And so we have kind of two stakeholders in our world.

The end user that, you know, is sitting and trying to do their job.

And also it right, who, as we talked about earlier, Ben, like, has lived in this world where, you know, they have lots of tools stacked on top of each other.

They have this huge queue of tickets that they're contending with, right.

And they're trying to make sense of this, you know, challenging construct where they, they may have, you know, tens of thousands of employees that are trying to do their job and they're, they're suffering.

Right.

And so our tool intersects that and, and that's what we're, we're trying to solve for, not, not monitoring.

Well, you mentioned having a global team in different time zones.

He's been doing this for a while.

How do you make sure everyone's doing what they need to do?

Like, I mean, I think, by the way, I think this is a universal concern.

I'm not a, you know, a micromanager.

I think, you know, we're about to do a kickoff with 400 people and, you know, the, the goal.

I'm a fan of, you know, you know, sort of KPIs and, you know, making sure that people understand, hey, this is what great looks like for the company, for your department, for you individually.

And, you know, those are, you know, that's the best work I've ever done in my career is sort of, you know, where you kind of like, really understand, hey, this is the mountain we're going to try to climb.

This is the role you have as we try to climb this mountain and you know, really empowering and inspiring and supporting people to reach their, their goals and giving them a lot of, like, leeway.

I think especially in this new world of AI and new tools, we have to sort of find their way to hitting those goals.

That's, to me, the strategy that works, right?

Kind of the bearing down on people and beating them into submission.

This has never worked for me.

The big stick

well, and it's harder even if for the leaders that are of that mindset of, hey, we're, I'm going to make sure everybody complies and gets their hours in it.

It's much harder and complex to do today.

And it's just.

It is.

I think the beauty of today is

that, you know, we, we have entered into an era where people can work anywhere on, you know, basically, and, and they can work anytime.

Right.

And so I think that's a, it really leans into this idea of like outcome driven management.

Right.

And you're not, it's not a factory in that where, hey, you need to punch a clock at 9 o' clock and, you know, you get to leave at 5.

Right.

You have flexibility.

And with that flexibility comes sort of like a personal responsibility to, to do your very best work.

All right, now I'm going to ask you a tough one.

Wrap this thing up.

You mentioned all those things that you guys are able to report on, right?

All the different little numbers that you're reporting.

Assume for a second that you've got to get rid of all of them for your customer, which, for your customers, which three would you keep?

As I said, you can only keep three.

Three things to measure, monitor.

Yeah, yeah.

So I mean, I think we're, we're looking at productivity, right?

And so.

Yeah, this is a great question.

Yeah, we're collect.

Yeah, we're collecting 10,000 metrics.

Right?

So 10,000 metrics.

And I want three.

We're con.

We're contextualizing them around a human experience.

And it's really hard to say that there's three, Ben, because, you know, part of the value is, is that you, it's sort of like you can't, you can't draw a really good distinct conclusion unless you have the whole frame.

Right.

And I think that's part of the challenge that we chase, right.

Is that you're.

And also the moat that we have in this space is that you can't really.

If you could do it with three, you know, three metrics, then everybody would chase those three metrics and the bar would be pretty low.

Right?

Yeah, I, Yeah, I guess you're tying it back to your early thing then.

If it were easy, everybody would be doing it.

Exactly.

Yeah.

We just, I just got off a call where we're adding 20 more unified communication protocols.

Right?

Well, everybody uses Zoom Team and maybe a few companies use WebEx, but there are people that use Google and Chime and some other strange unified communications.

And it's like, okay, well, those are very important to some of our biggest Customers.

Right.

And so it's really hard to say, like, three things.

I guess it's just.

I guess we look at it, you know, around the idea that like, we just want to.

We want.

We want to be able to coalesce all this data around a specific individual and then parse out, like, where the pain is.

I mean, we're doing some really interesting things right now, Ben, where we can start to even look at your.

The way you move the mouse, the way you type.

And we can start to assess, okay, this guy is not acting like he normally does because you know how you get when your things aren't going right, you start to.

To panic a little bit.

Right.

So we're even building some of that what we call frustration telemetry into the equation, right.

Where we can really start to.

To tell, like, this guy, how does it.

Something wrong here?

What are these frustration.

What is it frustration to like a frustration moment, right.

Where.

Yeah.

What are they other than like maybe a hand slapping a little harder?

You're moving the mouse in a way that you normally don't.

Right.

And so then all of a sudden we can zero in on like something is happening with this particular user experience.

So, yeah, it's kind of amazing what you can do with data, Ben.

So it's hard to say, like, oh, yeah, there's one or two or three data.

You're not going to give me three.

I can tell.

I can't, right?

I just really can't.

But you have a good reason why.

And I thought it was hilarious.

You're like, ben, we can even tell now people are starting to get frustrated at their computer.

But it's about, it's really.

And by the way, AI is such a gift, right?

Because the ability to parse through all that data in real time and enjoy the benefits of it previously, a lot of times we would have to.

A human has to see it with a naked eye.

They have to write a script or they have to react to it.

One of the amazing things about these AI models is they can kind of parse the data in real time.

They can see things that the human eye would miss.

They can source the script or the remediation.

And so I think over time, as this sort of builds on itself, right.

It only gets better.

And we're in the early innings of this.

Right?

But I think you're going to see just like we saw kind of autonomous cars where you had a human like in front of the wheel for a while, training the car and the models, getting safe enough, enough now where, you know, I, I, I'm in a neighborhood in San Francisco where I see more of the Waymo cars than I see regular cars.

Right.

And there's nobody in the seat, in the driver's seat anymore as the sort of guardian.

Right.

We're now in an autonomous state.

I would tell you the same thing is going to happen with the autonomous endpoint management.

Right.

We're in the next couple years, we're going to have all these remediations that will be recommended and we'll get to a point where we don't need that human in the loop and we just trust the models because it's been so effective, right?

Powerful, no one's getting hurt.

Yeah, that's the idea for sure.

And you think about it.

My original question, I liked how like your twist on it is because it's like, hey, we're not really looking, trying to look for universal, the big three things, because everything is at an individual level and the individual employee level.

And that's like really the customer, the digital customer experience.

One of the things I'm taking away is, Ben, the future is now and it's at the individual employee level.

And that's how we're looking at things.

If you can look at if someone's getting frustrated, what they do and how they move the mouse and how they, that, you know, the keys are punching or the action are taken on the screen, I mean, that really goes to show the power of the, of power, the possibility of what's coming.

So what's your, what's your parting thought for our listeners?

What's that, what's your parting thought for our listeners today?

Well, I think be optimistic, right.

The future we're living in a moment where I live through the dot com era, I live through the mobile and cloud era, and I've always been a believer and an optimist around technology.

And when I see, you know, what is in store for us, right?

And I feel like I live in San Francisco, so I'm kind of in this gold rush city, right, where you've had these big booms and buffs.

And I can tell you I feel it again right on the ground here in terms of where the future is being invented.

And it feels even more like extreme, right.

Like this is going to be something that will change humanity.

And if we get to sort of an AGI place in the next three to five years, like this is radically going to, it's, it's going to redefine humanity is how I see it.

And it has some amazing implications.

Some of them are pretty scary.

But I think I'm an optimist and I think when we think about the things that this can solve, the stuff we've talked about are probably fairly trivial.

Right.

When you think about the world's biggest problems.

And so, yeah, I think my message to your audience is stay tuned.

This is going to be an exciting next 24, 36 months.

It changes by the day and you'll participate in it and be excited about it.

But probably most importantly, you'll be kind to each other.

This is a small world.

We're here for a small time and it's about relationships and, and taking care of each other and having that kind of servant leadership, servant heart.

I think that's what you're going to be remembered for as a leader.

I know, yeah.

That that's what makes it worth it.

Be kind, everybody.

Check out Jed on LinkedIn and follow control up.

A lot of good things ahead.

Jed, thanks for joining us on the show, my friend.

Been wonderful conversation.

Thank you, Ben.

Want to boost your productivity and decision making?

Get vital insights from each episode delivered directly to your inbox.

A great resource whether you've listened to the episode or not.

Go to benfanning.com insight.