What if the very thing that built your company is the thing putting it at risk Now?

Growth doesn't fail because people are incapable.

High performing teams can outperform much larger organizations.

And that's Alon Diaz, CEO of Americus.

At Nortel, a company trusted with systems for governments, enterprises and entire populations.

It doesn't come from just pushing harder.

This perspective comes from work that helped digitize an entire nation and later convince the governments of rising countries to change decades of how they operate.

When Estonia, the government made the decision to digitize, it was at a time when more than 90% of its citizens didn't have access to broadband Internet.

In this episode, you'll discover the quiet moment that signals when a leader is starting to lose control.

What leaders get blindsided by first once scale accelerates, and the warning sign that growth is becoming a risk.

Let's dig in.

Welcome back to Lead the Team.

I'm your host Ben Fanning and this conversation that you're going to hear is 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.

Alon when you're not in the room.

How confident are you that the right.

Decision still gets made?

When and where did you see clarity breaking?

It definitely happened at Nortel when we scaled from 500, 800 people to now go to 2,000 and above.

It's that you, you realize all of a sudden that you've built the operating system of the company on, on heroics.

And when you start to see an organization grow where, where the closeness of people and the number of people we have people from Muscat, Oman to Vancouver BC all the way down to Argentina, all the way up to the northern parts of Finland, almost the Arctic Circle.

Truly around the world.

Truly.

And operating in that diverse environment, you start to realize that it's about the clarity of your purpose, the clarity of how you deliver outcomes for customers and how are we able to work today.

And this exists on multiple of our client relationships projects in the US where you have people from all different parts of the world contributing.

Nor Tall is very well known for building the world's first digital nation.

What is a digital nation by the way that being Estonia and why has it been so meaningful and what's it like telling people that you guys built the first digital Nation.

I have had the pleasure to visit Estonia many, many times, dozens of times and I've gotten to know as well many people there.

So I can get the citizens point of view in some level.

I can get it obviously understand what we've done for them.

But before even thinking about this, I really want to put in context this Estonia story and when Estonia made the decision.

And first of all, people listening and Estonia is located in northern Europe, eastern side underneath Finland.

And Estonia regained its independence in 1991 and so it didn't have much.

It wasn't trying to automate paper systems.

It was, it was really starting from ground zero.

But what makes the story to me very unique is that when Estonia, the government made the decision to digitize, it was at a time when more than 90% of its citizens didn't have access to broadband Internet.

Wow.

This wasn't a technology first move, right.

It was truly a leadership decision.

It was a visionary decision to design for the future before the infrastructure even fully existed.

Nortel was part of this process.

Really it takes the political will, it takes the foresight to even look at the way that you would Certainly we work and engage with governments around the world where we help them shape legislative policy to take advantage of digital services to its citizens.

There are laws in many western countries that are in the way that inhibit the ability for true digital systems to be put into play.

And so there is an aspect of policy work that we have to do.

So it's really not about the technology.

It has a lot to do with the, the willingness of the government to say we understand where we need to go.

And that brings clarity of purpose.

It needs long term thinking and courage to build for where the world is going, not where it happens to be.

So they had no government system, Estonia had no government system.

And they could have started with pencil and paper.

Instead they to like get things done.

Instead they said whoa, whoa, whoa, let's not invest our resources there, let's think long term.

We need.

So they needed vision, they needed resilience, they needed to be able to sell this vision to the people.

And here comes Nortel.

Like you said, we're one, one of few companies, you know, we, we like to, to say that's cool.

We've been responsible for 40% of, of the digital services.

But obviously it takes client like the government of Estonia that has that foresight.

Estonia is a country of 1.3 million and I often hear from, from other governments, well, it's easy to shape 1.3, but you know, my city has 5 million people in it.

And, and that's where we kind of lose a bit of the reality, which is that because you have a big number of citizens, you can't go digital.

It's too difficult there, it's too fragmented.

And we couldn't disagree more with that.

I think it really comes down, we think it really comes down to the willingness and sometimes being audacious.

The outcomes of it have brought the GDP for per capita for Estonia to one of the leading European countries.

It has the highest per capita of, of unicorns.

It's a tech hub for Europe and to do that with a population of 1.3 is simply amazing.

So it's something that unlocks the full potential of a country when you're able to digitize the services in a way that makes it easy to do business, allows citizens to have very proactive government services in support of.

You can file taxes in two minutes.

There's so much that comes to making a country more efficient, more effective, more competitive.

And we've seen the proof points all around the world where we've worked.

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.

Alon Diaz knows what it takes to scale something extraordinary because he leads a company that's done what most people still think is impossible.

Nortel helped build the world's first fully digital nation, turn government processes from days into minutes, and delivers mission critical systems that simply cannot fail.

And despite being just 2,800 people, they consistently beat out consulting giants hundreds of times their size.

Elon is the force scaling the impact across the Americas and his lessons are truly remarkable.

And you're going to hear him today.

So the CEO of America, of Nortel, Alon Diaz.

Welcome to lead the team, my friend.

Thanks so much, Ben.

Thanks for having me.

Joy to be here.

What's the leadership challenge that most shaped how you lead today?

And how did it turn into lasting momentum for your organization?

It's interesting.

I've been almost 30 years in my career.

You could ask that question in different stages, you're going to get different answers, but you really want kind of how I feel today.

So I really have, first of all, the pleasure to work with such talented people both in the Americas and globally.

And it's a very unique environment for me, me to be able to apply some of my, my leadership experience and, and the skills we have.

We've really stepped up to do big things and we've delivered on those the last eight years that I've been with the company.

So reflecting really in today's world, the leadership challenge that's shaping me the most and is really to learn to scale without losing clarity.

I spend my career building and scaling companies across the US and Europe.

And what I've seen repetitively is that growth doesn't fail because people aren't capable.

It fails because complexity outpaces alignment.

And what I've learned is that gaining that lasting momentum in the organization, it doesn't come from just pushing harder.

It comes from clarity.

And it's a simple.

Clarity is simple.

It's really, really hard to be explicit about what you do as a company exceptionally well, where you can apply that clarity inside the organization and how importantly those decisions get made when things get ambiguous.

Our leadership, and it's true in all companies, our leadership makes tens, sometimes hundreds of decisions combined each week that steers you closer to your strategy or further away.

And so it really comes to that level of clarity.

When I stepped into my role at Nortel, the company already had extraordinary proof points, right?

Building digital national systems.

We were operating in high threat cybersecurity environments and we're delivering work where failure simply isn't an option.

So my challenge wasn't to invent that excellence or reinvent the company.

It was really to translate it, to scale it and make it repeatable in a new market like the Americas.

Inside a company that's now, you know, 2,800 people, almost 3,000.

So you know, when I think about that leadership lesson to tie it together, it's when, when clarity is in place, high performing teams, especially when you're now able to supercharge them with AI, those those teams can outperform much larger organizations.

And that's the leadership lesson that, that's guiding you right now.

How, how I scale the business.

How do you know as a leader?

Like, you know what?

The clarity here is not where it needs to be.

Like where, how does it show up?

Because you, like you're saying all these different locations and you're probably on team calls with different, different ones and they're literally, y', all, they're literally speaking different languages, right?

How does this clarity show up?

Because I'm wondering for leaders, they want to learn from you about, okay, this guy clearly knows about this part.

Where, how are they going to see it coming up too?

Well, I think you have, yes, we do have wonderful accents from all around the world and we do have English as our, as our common language.

But oftentimes you go into a company and you ask them, why do customers keep buying from you?

And you're going to get multiple answers from that.

And what I think clarity means is that we know what we're doing that is differentiated in the value that we deliver from our competitors to those customers.

And that comes by listening.

You have this continuous cycle of understanding how can we serve a customer in the Middle east, in Germany, in the uk, in Canada, in the US In Brazil, and be able to really shape the value in a way that the customer is essentially buying what they want without telling you explicitly what they want.

You have to understand where you fit into that mix.

So when you ask that question in Nortel and they tell you something, they're like, you ain't got it.

Like, you just started in Nortel last week.

You don't really know how we're doing it.

What's the conversation you have with them around what we're really doing here?

Because y', all, it's not like they're walking around the office, right, and seeing each other.

No, they're not seeing.

They may never even meet each other.

But they're in charge of these giant projects.

Yeah, we, so we, we've invested internally on, on systems that, that first, like you have to infuse yourself into what the company is doing all around the world.

Because what, what's interesting is that our projects, even if we're doing government or, or public or private sector, there's a lot of what we do that translates from one to the other, right.

Mission critical systems, you know, highly resilient, secure products.

And so we need to understand those narratives.

And we, we invested quite a bit internally in systems that give us the visibility of what is going on so we can search and natural search language of all sorts of types of business problems or government challenges that we're solving.

And we're bringing those things together in a way that's consumable.

And then we have a lot of engagement internally that talks about what we're doing for our customers so that there is this understanding of what that magic looks like and it will change.

As an organization, we're very adaptable.

We have a mindset that is really of constant Change and being able to look at opportunities when the market is, especially right now as the market is shifting so quickly and the expectations of customers in both government and large enterprise is continually evolving.

And we as an organization need to take a step or two above that and really understand where we fit in the new world.

When was the moment that you realize a 1400 person company could actually beat firms with 300,000 employees?

And why do you think they didn't see it coming?

I think the realization came when, when I saw how quickly our teams could move from decision to delivery and how much friction.

Large organizations just carry right to align internally.

And we often serve, you know, obviously large organizations where we do see that friction, we have a role as their consultant to come in, reduce that friction, have them be optimized to deliver their service, a citizen service or services to their customers.

Well, the same thing somewhat exists with our competitors.

You know, these are large firms.

You know, some of our competitors have almost a million employees worldwide.

And so those firms are optimized for scale and risk distribution.

And Nortel is really optimized for outcomes.

So that forces discipline.

When you're working with governments, militaries, Fortune 500s in environments where security, speed, scale all matter, that forces discipline.

And we really like to work with teams that have more experience.

We're enabling them through AI tooling, some of it proprietary, some of it available in the market.

And suddenly 2800 person firm can operate with a leverage that's much larger than its size.

We have a favorite saying in the company is that we're big enough to scale but small enough to care.

And we think that makes a lot of difference in the relationships with our customers.

Do you believe you can scale care?

Yeah, I do, I do.

I think it's in your culture, which is another, you know, when you have a very diverse organization, especially one that operates predominantly remotely.

Now I have the pleasure of working with 850 professionals in the Americas and we have a fair number of those colleagues in Latin America and we have centers in Latin America.

The vast majority of those people though are out in, you know, spread across 18 different countries.

And so one of the areas that Nortel's always invested in is really how do we bring the glue?

Our culture, and that culture is also travels.

That, that culture exists in Saudi Arabia, it exists in Serbia, it exists in Ukraine, where we have 375 employees, colleagues of ours that we hold dearly in mind every day.

How do we all bond together as an organization?

Much like a lot of companies right now, kind of end of year we just had our group all hands kind of holiday send off.

We had this really touching.

We do it all every year, if I remember now, this touching montage of all of our employees in different parts of the world celebrating the end of the year.

And I think it's those kind of moments that we invest to create across Nortel and share that bonds people together.

And so you know that someone that you're going to be collaborating with in Finland on a project in the US they care.

It's part of the culture, it's part of how we're built as an organization.

Do you believe that leaders should and think about Northall too?

Should leaders hire for care or they should hire for skills and what they can do and then you get them to care when they come inside the organization.

A thinking around intelligence and emotional intelligence and how do you seek employees that are going to bring empathy to their work?

There is empathy in collaborating across borders.

There is empathy that you have to bring in your client relationship.

You have to think as if you're part of their organization and you have to empathize with the challenges as they are your own.

And I'm not sure that that is teachable from, from, from ground zero.

Right.

If you haven't really worked that muscle.

But if you're coming in with the inclination towards, you know, or higher level of understanding of emotional intelligence, I think you can develop that.

I think that you develop it with like minded teams with people that bring care and pride in their work and their craft to the table every day.

Yeah, it's interesting.

It's like we hire for like a baseline of empathy and care but they've got to, we kind of work them through and involve them in this to sort of trigger what it's going to be like for our specific customers.

What's the highest stake system that your team's ever built or failure simply wasn't an option.

And I know you have got several.

I think we've built our business really around that.

I think the notion of, of mission criticality in the work that we do.

I often think about a retired person in one of the countries where we've implemented different types of digital services.

But the one that comes to mind often is this notion of a retired lady in Estonia that has access to our pension funds every month and is, you know, a system that can't fail, that it needs to be intuitive enough for someone that isn't maybe technically minded to access and interact with for really critical life saving needs.

In some cases when it comes to some of the healthcare systems that we've built.

So it's really, you know, any system where a government, military, a critical institution, if it stops functioning, it fails.

And from our perspective Nortel, we have the experience to build and secure large scale digital backbones, tax systems, identity platforms, data exchange layers, cybersecurity.

It serves millions of citizens, protects them and there's enormous economic, national value and with our private sector customers, large revenue streams.

I know we support a customer that has very intense holiday spikes like what's going on right now, where even the system being down for a minute can represent millions in revenue lost.

And so those environments just failure isn't just a bad release, right.

It's a loss of trust, it's a loss of sovereignty in some cases loss of revenue and profits or in some cases real world harm.

Right.

And so it brings a different mindset to building those types of systems and the level of trust that our customers have around the world that we can deliver that for them.

Um, it's, it's a high stake environment.

Estonia's digitization is an incredible story and it's gotten incredible results.

I mean it's really been a, it's really hit the fast forward button, so to speak.

Always possible.

And again, again going back to the power of leadership man, because people have to, you have to set the North Star of what's possible.

And they made a generational decision, not a right now decision.

That's right, that's right.

You know, huge difference.

Now flip it kind of thinking about a sort of a different situation where Nortal has been a leader.

How did you all convince the government of Oman that's been doing business the same way for a long time, to suddenly change everything that they'd been doing in just a matter of months?

I mean first credit is all to the vision and the leadership that the government in Oman has shown.

And we happen to be a provider, a catalyst maybe in that process in regards to this kind of convincing, I think Oman really tied the digital transformation for the country very, very directly to their national priorities, right?

Economic competitiveness, security, sovereignty, resilience.

And so this was not positioned as it modernization.

And it's really when you're able to tie the way they did that the necessity for them to invest in digital services for its citizens really tied very closely to the future that they wanted for their country.

And so we, we see the same dynamic everywhere, right?

Change happens when leaders trust that systems will hold under pressure, that, that there is a, there is a platform that they can build upon and once that trust is built, you know, the speed follows, right?

There are definitely much more sophisticated evolutions of E government.

You know, it's not just about digitizing paper, although in some cases that's where maybe a government or an agency might be.

It's all the way now to delivering proactive services to when maybe your child is born, you know, you and your spouse walk out of the hospital.

That the government, instead of you reaching out to five or six different agencies, the government proactively puts a package together for your newborn and says, okay, these are the government services that you have access to.

Would you like to sign up for that?

And you know, going back to this kind of willingness and political will and change, you know, going back to Estonia for a second, they actually wrote in their constitution that the government could only ask for your personal information once.

It's the one and only principle that they have.

And the second is that they would, they, they would never ask you to authenticate yourself more than once.

So there is a way for data to be protected within each of the areas of the government without having to be, you know, without having you to go through those hoops.

And so, so you don't have to.

Like dole out your birthday to all.

Every single agency that you go.

Or Social Security number, they're like, no, we know you've got your number.

Yeah.

Or your Social Security number for the, for last.

How about that?

You never have to do that again.

Man, that, that is so, so cool.

What, Any, any, any key lessons or tips in the company lore of Nortal about Oman and because Oman was like, hey, we've gotta probably change some naysayers who are kind of stuck in their ways to do this change.

Where Estonia is more like a greenfield where we're just like, we have to like, our risk here is not being visionary enough of what it could be.

And Aman, the challenge probably was like you say, like overcoming the naysayers.

What's, what's bike picked up in the culture?

What tips and lore of are circulating inside Nortel about those two experiences?

I mean, I can think of others as well.

I think obviously there's a ton of pride that our people have in being able to make impact.

I think that drives our culture that we are very outcome driven, both in the way that we operate the business as well as how we hold ourselves accountable to the trust that our customers are giving us.

This is all across the board.

And I think that the focus on impact and being able to deliver impact at speed, there is no concept of Big bang today that either a large enterprise or a government will want to subscribe to.

They're going to want to see great outcomes in shorter periods of time.

And so you have to have this iterative delivery of how you get to that vision.

And in some cases the journey is long and Nortel may have very important parts in that journey and maybe a little less part.

And then, you know, we ebb and flow to support our customers through that.

These are generally very long term efforts.

You know, even though Estonia started 25 years ago, it still is building and innovating on the digital services it provides to its citizens.

Just like many of our private sector customers continue to evolve the platforms that we've built, you know, against the new needs of the business.

And so for us it's, it's connecting those dots.

It's really understanding the impact, understanding the value that we can drive to our, to, to both, you know, our customers and often case their end customer.

But being really in tuned with that, that's where we get alignment with our clients because we're, we're both really thinking about it the same way.

It's not about building another technology system, it's about solving problems.

And I think about this, I'm like, man, the, the amount of confidence your company must have of like, hey, we revolutionized Estonia and Oman.

Imagine what we can do for your company success.

It's like, hey, you know, we, you.

Know, one of the, one of the more interesting things the last couple of years and we've always had a very, very strong cybersecurity capability as imagine.

And our firm, in partnership with others in the government of Estonia were part of the first response to a sovereign, sovereign attack, digital attack in the world that occurred in, in 2007.

Wow.

To which country?

It was Russia attacking Estonia, shutting down.

Its systems because Russia was their former.

They were part of the, the Soviet Union for.

Yeah, not by will, but so we.

Got a nice gift from Russia as a giant total country cyber attack.

And you guys had built the infrastructure or been part of the infrastructure build out?

Yeah, yeah, we did.

And our teams mobilized again others as well and the government mobilized and blunted the attack in the first 48 hours.

So the notion of security is just, it's DNA for us.

And we, you know, have the privilege of working for defense agencies as well around the world.

And what's interesting is how cyber threats have evolved over the years.

And I'm going to talk really from a private sector perspective in the US that you would have far less organized hacking groups Going and trying to get your data.

And obviously they've been successful.

And certain industries, especially the ones that we work in, which are critical infrastructure sectors in the economy, they are now not very different than a military base.

Sovereign threat actors around the world are wanting to get into their networks, their data and disrupt it or have some sort of sabotage by way of the products or software that are being used by their customers.

So it's a very, very complex web to, to, to defend against the, the experience we have working with defense agencies, militaries translates very directly to that kind of problem.

And that today is, is, I would say every single Fortune 500 is facing the same level of threat that again, a military base is facing today.

You know, so it's, it's, for us, it's a, it's, it's a challenge that we can really step up to.

And we have the, the trust, you know, from our, our clients that, that were the right firm to do that.

So there's a lot of pride, you know, from our team.

It's a great pride and great way to bridge that expertise into really powerful ways.

Yeah.

You know, and to help the commercial sector.

And I bet they're like, I bet, I bet the CEOs are bragging about working with you guys.

Yeah, they built Estonia so they can surely help us here.

Such a phone that I love or a lot of fun.

What's your parting thought for our listeners today?

Maybe one.

As I'm going through the end of the year, I always ask myself the question of where did this year live?

I travel a lot around the globe between Europe, Latin America, North America.

For me, really the pervasive thought is we're living in a pretty messed up world.

Right.

Some of us that have been maybe around the world a little longer, these are really interesting times and not, not in a good way yet.

I go around the world and I meet people from different corners and, and the people, they're the same.

The, you know, people that have hope.

Hope for their families, for their, for, for their friends, hope for themselves working in, in a world that is de.

Globalizing but is more global than it ever has been with the way that, that media is, transcends every border.

Everyone has access to information at the same time or generally the same time if they have an open Internet.

And so in some ways the world is splitting apart as it's coming together.

And I think the optimistic thought is that the world can get better.

The people in this world want it to be better.

And you know, with the experience I have meeting folks from around the world.

I can say that that's something I believe in.

So I am looking to brighter future for all of us.

We deserve it.

Thanks for joining us on Leave the Team Alone.

Thank you so much.

Ben.

Pleasure.

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 bidfanning.com insight.