Patience and Persistence Counts with Vint Cerf [Google]

+ Notes

Vint Cerf is one of the "Fathers of the Internet" (No, dear People, Tim Berners Lee did not build the Internet) Vint, as Programme Manager at DARPA , then Stanford, then UCLA was tasked to find the smartest people possible and give them the task of make the vision of an Internet into a reality. Then, when the Internet was switched on and working, guess what? … he started on an Internet for the Solar System of course. And succeeded.

Some stories aren’t meant to be short. Some stories are sagas. The history of the Internet is a saga. These are stories that will resonate with every one of you: CEOs, CIOs, CMOs. Stories of focus, frameworks, freedom, co-creation, collaboration and openness.

+ Transcript

KATZ : Welcome to Humans Leading Humans towards a Future of Work that Works for People; a smorgasbord of of snackable stories to help you be a more effective leader.

This week is a little bit special. I am so honoured to be joined by Vint Cerf , who is often referred to as the father of the internet, and if you don't already know, you'll find out why in a second. So if you think the what you're trying to do right now is difficult. Just imagine the complexities involved in managing the kind of brains involved in making the imagined reality and creating the internet.

So today you're gonna get a bit of a sneak preview into how this podcast is made, and see adaptability in action. Adaptability is one of the CREATE “A”s

So you'll know by now that I'm a massive fan of formats. But best laid plans of mice and men and all that - this week we're gonna break all the rules because that's what rules are for.

First let me explain why I dedicate time to make this weekly podcast for you, and why I hope you will want to subscribe.

If you work inside a company or an organisation, whether it be private or public or big or small. If you work with humans. Do you sometimes find it challenging to get your teams to do the things you need them to do? You can see exactly what needs to happen, so why can't they?

It’s really tough.

Bring on Humans Leading Humans. This audio fuel kit is made for you with love. It's packed with the stories, the tools and the inspiration that we all need to shine as leaders. So keep it in your backpack for those times when you need to re energise, to be inspired, to believe that you can succeed. Because here's the thing, leaders across the world have succeeded. They have proved that you can lead teams in even the most complex situations.

If you understand what makes humans tick.

So, I'm on a quest to collect those stories to give you the courage and the know how to lead more human. Now next week, I'm going to be talking to my dear friend and inspiration Harley Dubois, who is the Chief Culture Officer of the Burning Man Project. I mentioned last week, that this woman and being at Burning Man changed the way that I see the world of work. So that's going to be an absolute cracker.

But before we continue, I want to say again, a massive, massive thank you to all of the people who've reached out and said they've been inspired by this podcast. Thank you! It means a lot to me., It energizses me so please do reach out and give me your feedback.

So the way that this podcast works is that I send the CREATE framework to my guests, and I asked them to choose real warts and all stories that are triggered by the framework. The CREATE framework by the way is a simple way to remember how to nurture the environments in which humans thrive. Head over to www.wearebeep.com to find out what each of those letters means. So they look at the framework, they figure out which three stories they want to tell. Then we have chat for about half an hour, about how we can tell those stories in the best possible way to inspire you, dear listener, to be more imaginal. Vint Cerf, it it turns out, is not one to be tethered by format. So what you'll hear today is pretty well. Our entire conversation, because some stories are not meant to be short, they are epic, and some humans are not meant to be confined by formats. So buckle up, listen in, be inspired.

Welcome, Vint Cerf.

VINT: I’m still struggling to figure out what three stories are appropriate. Let me suggest three, and we'll see whether they match your criteria. One obvious one of course is how the hell did the internet happene. I think we can be brief about some key moments that indicate what it took to make that happen.

KATZ: I have no idea about the amount of people stuff that happened behind the internet. So this is about the human side of things so there must have been so many blockers. And I don't mean on the technology, I mean on the people not taking it seriously, not hearing, not wanting to be part of it, not believing ,all of those things.

VINT: Remember this wasn't that wake up in the morning I'm going to invent the internet. This is where like the defense department saying, we got a dozen universities doing research on artificial intelligence and we want them to share their results and their computing power, how do we do that. And they ended up developing something called the ARPANET which was super Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Exercise packet switching which was at the time, a technology that was considered crazy by the traditional telecoms people who were using circuit switching, which is a much slower process. I mean you dial on the phone when you wait for somebody to answer. Computers are impatient. They don't want to wait they just want to fling the data out and get it to the destination so packet switching is faster. So we built the ARPANETand discovered that it was possible to get disparate machines from different manufacturers to communicate with each other over a common homogeneous packet switch net. And so that was an engineering project. When it worked. Then we started saying okay how do we use computers for command and control, and that meant the computers were going to be in ships at sea and aircraft and and mobile vehicles but we built the ARPANET based on dedicated telephone circuits. So how the heck are you going to do that, you know the tanks over and over the wires will break.

So we developed a mobile packet radio system which is what you use today when you drive around with your mobile, and this was back in 1973. Incidentally, by the way the handheld mobile telephone project was started also in 1973, completely independently in parallel, we were working on very similar concepts of radio based mobile communication, except we were focused on data communication and Marty Cooper was doing the handheld mobile for Motorola, is focused on voice communication. But then you know for the ships at sea, we had a packet satellite system, so we had mobile packet radio packet satellite plus the ARPANET which we’d already built. The question was how do you hook all these things together and make them look uniform. And that's where the TCP IP protocols came from. So we published a paper in 1974 saying this is how you do it. And then we started doing it in 1975. And it took from 1975 to 1983 to get to the point where we could actually turn this system on. And in that interim period starting in 1978, there was a huge battle that began with the international standards organisations, especially the Europeans deciding, anyone have anything to do with this military stuff and they developed what they call the Open Systems Interconnection model Of internetworking. They pursued that independent of the TCP IP stuff so there was a 15 year battle from 1978 to 1993, between these two standards. And oh by the way, just for the element, and behind the scenes in 1976 Another packet switch standard came along x 25 from the Consultative Committee on the international Telephony. now called ITUT. So there were at least three computer packet switch networking protocols that were intended to solve the problem of inter networking. There was just a persistent battle for 15 years and eventually the TCP IP protocols won partly because we just kept implementing them. Everybody else was documenting things but not getting them built. So we just did it. Our theory was get it to work, and then document it, as opposed to document and then try to figure out what works. So, we went through four iterations to that, you know, I had the benefit of support from the US federal government. To do this, and so I had assets, resources and people. I didn't have to go beg for money. And that, believe me. That's a huge difference between doing the startup which you know well. I had funding and resources available to do this and eventually ended up running the program for the Defence Department

KATZ: Bear in mind that the people are listening to this are people who are, I would imagine.. because of the kind of people that we're pushing it out to. They are senior leaders inside large organisations, going, oh my god everyone's talking about digital transformation. How do we get people aligned, how do we get them to move from where they are, old style to future of work. So, how many people were working with you then? We know there was government funding but how many people working with you then and how did you get the best from them.

VINT: Part of the reason that I got the best is that the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency's tactics were to find the smartest people they could find and put them to work on a problem. They could get away with that, None of this competitive bidding crap, This was a question of - go find the smartest people you can input them to work on the problem. So I had a cadre of a few dozen people at different universities working on this stuff, who had worked on the ARPANET. They had experience with packet switching. And then Bob Kahn and I stirred them up on the network idea, and put them to work on it, So I had really fantastic smart people working on this. And then as time went on, other agencies recognise the utility of this kind of networking and invested in it by building their own pieces of backbone. So the department of energy.n The National Science Foundation build NSF net. NASA had NASA.net and we had the ARPANET. So we have four big backbones in the US, which we interconnected using this technology. So we were scaling this thing. With the help of the US federal government, By the mid to late 1980s came along, we're starting to see Europeans, especially up in the north, encouraging that group, while in the meantime of course in Central Europe, there is all this, we don't want to have anything to do with his military crap bla bla bla,

We eventually overwhelmed them. But you know the big message here is patience and persistence. I mean I was persistent about pushing this, and patient in saying you know this stuff works. We know it works. I was given the freedom to persist. I was at DARPA for six years, I was at Stanford for four years, and I was at UCLA for five years. And so, you know, do the math, that's 15 years of persistence, to the point where, when I left DARPA in 1982, we were able to turn the internet on formally.

KATZ: You've got some of the smartest people in the world, from different organisations working together, therefore your leadership must have been or you must have given people something where they could see something different, they wanted to be part of that otherwise people would have drifted. it’s hard to get people to collaborate.

VINT: here were two things that contributed to that. Steve Crocker , who was my close friend, and still is, we were at UCLA together and Steve led, what was called the network working group, which was a dozen universities working on the ARPANET, and it was totally open to anyone, it was free to contribute. We had big arguments over what was the right thing to do but there was this huge freedom to participate and to there was no top down behavior at all. We adopted that same tactic for the internet. We basically said, Okay, here's the architecture of the system, it's wide open. If you don't like this particular stack of protocols add some you know to the writer Add a new layer. Please, you know, you're welcome to come and try to convince everybody that your ideas are needed. And so this openness and willingness to listen to new ideas was absolutely essential. Everybody felt free to participate. And so it wasn't like they were assigned a particular thing, they largely said all I can do this part and I can do that part, Paul Baron, he was a very famous engineer, who came up with the idea of packet switching in the early 1960s, describes this process is building a cathedral. You know where you need all kinds of skills and expertise, and although occasionally somebody will say, “I built the cathedral”… well actually they put one brick in over here and somebody else says, “Well I did all the sculptures:, and so I hope the cathedral . Paul kept reminding everybody it takes everybody to build this thing. And so we had the benefit of people contributing to their skills and their ideas and a framework, both as an institutional framework and a development framework, or an engineering framework, that allowed people to do that.

KATZ : I love that that's the story that's the story I think, I think, like I say, the CIO of DXC who’s come from this quite traditional way of doing things, Just to hear that story of just getting actually no we didn't tell people what to do, we gave them a framework, we said, look, come bring your stuff so what was your governance situation if you don't mind me asking how did you, or was it totally self governed.

VINT: There were contracts associated with each of the organizations that were participating in the Internet work. So I was responsible for for those agreements as the Program Manager at DARPA, and of course there were others before me at DARPA who handled that same process. I also had a significant responsibility for the technical evolution of the system, but I was there primarily to try to keep things going on track and to not let them drift off to stay focused on the primary objective of getting this thing to work. So I had fingers in the protocol for most of the time that the internet was being developed - until it was turned on in 1983. And so even as a Program Manager my fingers were down in the text of the of the specs, and of course I had the ability to persuade peopleby saying listen, I'm paying for this. So pay attention otherwise you don't get a contract next year. So I had plenty of power, but the style of the work I think was very collaborative.

KATZ: Yes, and I you know so what you've just said is, oh yeah, we have the contracts and the money. I know you. I don't know you hugely well, I know you well enough to know that you're really warm, you're really open, you listen, you're not, program manager, delivered today as well I don't think you are. Are you? VINT: This was a very special aspect of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency is that they gave enormous agency to the program managers: budget, funding, and the freedom to really pursue to engage as deeply as they wanted to. You can't ask for more freedom than there. That’s primarily, the reason this all worked out. Now there's another reason why it worked. And that's because new work and people eventually saw business in it. And so by 1984 we started to see router companies like Cisco Systems and Pronium, building pieces of equipment to help build the internet, or help make the internet. And then, not very long thereafter in 1989, we saw network service providers, you net PSI, surf net all came out in 1989. And then the world wide web hits in 1991. Tim Berners Lee released designing for HTTP and HTML. In this rather compressed period of time from 1983 to 1991, so roughly a 10 year period, we see this rapid evolution into commercial practice.

So we have Netscape Communications comes along in 1994, and it goes public in 1995 and at that point, the venture capital community is fixated on the internet. And they’re throwing money at anything that looks like it might have something to do with the internet, and then we hit the crash of April 2000 Because a lot of the people who've gotten a lot of capital spend all the capital, didn't have any revenue and so they went out of business. But the internet continued it persisted, and of course, by this time, the World Wide Web is showing all kinds of possibilities. By that time, Google was two years old. I think Yahoo was a little older, maybe four years old, and they were superseding things like AOL and Prodigy, that were walled gardens, and the internet was just wide open space and - so different from the style of AOL, for example. And now of course we've got walled gardens again in the form of things like Facebook.

KATZ : So this is where I come into the story soI started falling high understand what the world wide web and the internet is in 2000, and I didn't know anything about large corporations. I just can see that this is the most extraordinary opportunity for people to start collaborating in different ways, and learning from each other and swapping and. And that's where this journey towards digital transformation comes.

What's funny even listening to the way that you're talking about this extraordinary journey over these years, is this agility, this collaboration and the openness and the frameworks and the freedom are they what's made the internet and then trying to force that into organisations are not built to do that. And here we are 20 years later, still not quite getting our culture and our technologies aligned with each other. So that's your first story and I think that I'm going to keep a lot of what we've just said anyway. The bits that really really resonated with me and will resonate with our listeners are this idea of the cathedral,: there’s an architect, there are a number of architects, everybody built a piece of it, everybody says they own it. And isn't that how a large corporation should be. What's your next story.?

VINT: Well the next story starts in 1998. It follows the successful landing of the Pathfinder robot on Mars in 1997. The previous successful landing for in 1976 two Viking landers, sent by the US of Mars. And then for 20 years nothing worked. Everything failed, for whatever reason, and then finally Pathfinder landed successfully on Mars in 1997 So I got together with a team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the spring of 98 to talk about communications for space exploration. We started with the question, what should we be doing now that we will need 25 years from now in order to support men robotic space exploration. And we said well why don't we build an internet for the solar system. We started out thinking that we could use the TCP IP protocols of the Earth, internet, worked on earth so it ought to work on Mars. And we very quickly discovered that although that's probably a true statement, the problem is that the interplanetary distances are literally astronomical - and the speed of light is too slow. And so it takes three and a half minutes for a radio signal to go from Earth to Mars when we're closest together. In in 20 minutes when we're firing this the party in our respective orbits. That's double bad for the round trip time. The protocols, the TCP IP system were not designed with 40 minute round trip times. And it gets worse, of course as you get to the outer planets you're talking hours to even days. So, we said okay, the other problem, where the planets are rotating and we don't have a stop there. So, if you're talking to something on the surface of the planet and it rotates, you can't talk to it anymore. So what we're faced with in interplanetary communication is variable delay and disruption. And so we said, Okay, time to go back to square one. We need to design a suite of protocols that will deal with variable delay and disruptions and we call them DTN technologies, and we develop something we call the bundle protocol and we went through four iterations of that. The same kind of tactic was, was adopted as got us to the internet; a small team of people beginning with a vision in mind about designing and building this to meet the requirements.

We all had the same objective. We had massive battles and disagreements and everything else but it was safe to have those disagreements because everybody knew that we were all trying to get the same place. So there was a great deal of mutual respect among the people who were doing this work. And so it was okay to have the big fight because it wasn't personal. it was, it was engineering battles and of course in an engineering battle for the most part, there is a way of deciding whether or not an idea is good or bad. i mean either it works or it doesn't work, or it works well or it works poorly. And so there are metrics you can apply and that's very helpful for settling disputes, because you have a concrete way of figuring out what's the best way to do this.

So, that effort has been going on since 1998 and here it is 2021, and we're at the point now where the protocols, just like the TCP IP protocols have been standardised by the Consultative Committee and space data systems which is a UN organization that supports communications and data handling for space exploration. And it's been standardized in the Internet Engineering Task Force so it's readily available for terrestrial applications. And now it's being pushed out into the return to the moon on the Artemis mission . We’ve got it running on the International Space Station. We have prototypes running on Mars and in orbit around Mars, but it's taken 20 some odd years to get there and so we're back to patience and persistence and support from government agencies, So we had support from NASA, we had support from DARPA. to do this initial work. And once again it's taken a long time to get there, but the persistence of the support has been Ultra valuable and the persistence of the people/. Some of the people who were part of the program have been there, just like I have since 1998 So we're talking nearly 25 years.

KATZ: So actually I'm going to completely forget the format because I want to capture every minute. So if you're talking to somebody in a large organization, night, you know any of the ones that I work with, whether it'd be a large bank or a large pharmaceutical, they really struggle with retention. People come in, they quite often don't quite know how they fit into the big organisation. What would your advice be to them from the experience that you've had over, oh by the way, creating the internet with a bunch of people which has to have been a fairly straight you know there must been all sorts of personal struggles on the way through that, because there always are. And then, let's make a connected technology system for space. So, what would your advice be to people who and you're working on Google now, so you know the pain of even working in the best company in the world.

VINT: So, there are two R's that are at work here one is RESPECT and the other is RELEVANCE. If you don't have a group of people that respect each other, it's really hard to make progress because they'll fall into debate and dispute, which turns personal. So respect is absolutely essential for success in this space. Relevance is equally important people want to know that what they're doing is relevant. And so it's important for everybody to have in mind is what I am doing, getting us to the goal. And the good news here is that it was easy to express what the goal was. So you could keep it in top of mind. It's like sending a man to the moon getting him back safely. This is an easily expressed thing you can hang on to that and ask yourself is what I am doing now helping to get to that goal. When I was 18 I was working on the f1 engines for the Apollo program, I was part of the testing team. And, you know, so I knew that my little bit was important because if the damn engine didn't run properly you'd never make it off the ground. So I felt proud of my little bit in that program. So in the case of internet, it was pretty clear we knew what we wanted, we wanted a system that would allow any network to connect to any other network, and every computer to connect to every other computer in a uniform way. And so if that was an easily stated goal same arguments true for the interplanetary internet: How do I allow any spacecraft anywhere in the world, we won't say universe but let's say solar system, to communicate with any other. How do we make that look uniform? How do we allow multiple networks to interact with each other in this space environment? So easily stated goals that you can relate to and you can relate your work to HAVE to be a part of that solution and hanging onto people and making them feel like their contributions count.

KATZ: So how did you, you, meaning the collaborative body that was working together. How did you make sure that you always had people, you have, you've had people working on the second project for how many years?

VINT: Almost 25 It started in 1990. It's grown over time every laboratory at NASA is now involved, and the Japanese Space Agency and the European space agency NASA, Korean space agency are all participant now in this program. We've set up a special interest group in the Internet Society called the Interplanetary Network Special Interest Group do we have 800 people around the world who are interested in this. We got protocols running on the cloud based systems now: Azure and Google and Amazon all are running protocols as part of it. This is all very, that part is experimental. So this is expanded or over time. But yeah, step by step, you just draw people in. And since a lot of them are volunteers, they're not getting paid to do anything so they must really care about this. Otherwise why would they do it. Or being paid to do the work, and it's because organisations who are funding it wants the results.

KATZ: And again it's a story about the cathedral, everybody's doing their own little tiny people make something they can imagine what it's going to be like at the end. And I wonder then stepping back completely going away from the format, how much of the development of the Internet and then thereafter the World Wide Web was associated with stories with imagination with people can be able to see what the possibilities were

VINT: Several things are important here. First of all, the layered architecture of the Internet, and the careful specifications, allowed for a great deal of freedom to invent new applications and new protocols to support them. So the architecture invited invention. That's important, You can fit new protocols in at higher layers or horizontally and that's going on all the time, There are hundreds of protocols associated with the internet. Tthe same argument can be made for the interplanetary system the same argument can be made for the worldwide web because what's happened is the basic hypertext transport protocol and hypertext markup language have evolved over time, wince Tim introduced this in 91, and the organizations that have grown up around the standards making activity, have been crafted to invite people to invent, to enable people to offer their ideas. No ideas forced on anyone. It's a consensus kind of process. There’s a world wide web consortium which does the web based protocols and there's the Internet Engineering Task Force, and there are other standards activities as well and IEEE for example does an awful lot of local area networking, things like Wi Fi Ethernet and so on. And there are other standards organizations, the International Telecommunications Union, the International Standards Organization all have the potential to contribute, and again to come back to the cathedral analogy, it takes different skills in order to build this thing. And so what you try to do is take advantage of the best skills you can find

KATZ: And allow people to be where they're best. I'm not thinking about the fact that you know, there might be a CMO, who's listening to this who has touched the internet, basically through the Obviously we'll be using their mobile phone and with our entire reality is kind of centered on the internet. And they probably are desperately trying to figure out how we get from where many of these large corporations have been set up like machines with their silos and their hierarchies and their bureaucracies. Digital transformation to them, feels like something scary and impossible. And actually what you're talking about is the fact that this has all come from the CREATE way of working. Actually, Empowerment. I guess the Energy of knowing that you're stepping forward, measuring things in a way so that people can see progress all those kind of things. So what advice would you give to that CMO, who's going. How do I help this organisation to operate as one XCI.

VINT: Well, first of all, architecture helps. So understanding the business that you’re in, and how it's organised, understanding who the customers are then what it is that they need. And being able to articulate that to a variety of different players, whether it's the finance department or the marketing department or the sales department or the engineering department or the operations department. If you can't articulate what it is that a system is supposed to do. If you can describe what all the pieces are how they interact with each other. Why would you expect anyone in the company to understand that.

And so for me, every project that I've been involved: The internet, MCI Mail interplanetary all have had the character that there was an architecture associated with this. There were pieces. We thought about it as a system. And I can tell you that my respect for sales and marketing grew dramatically during the course of my work on the internet because I realised very early on if you can't sell your ideas you're out of luck, because you can't get anybody to help you because why would they believe you. And so you not only do you have to believe in the ideas, but you have to be able to articulate that to people whose help you want. And once you get them fired up it's more a question than just aiming in the right direction and bam if they go,

So, for me, I'm trying to impress on engineers how important to sales and marketing is. And when I was in early days as an engineer I remember not understanding the difference between marketing and sales. I thought there was all sort of one thing and it was kind of, you know, rah, rah, you know, and I thought well you know, it's not as important as engineering. Well I was wrong. And I've got to the point now where my engineers down and they say not listening to the talk to you about marketing and sales. And. No, no, no, i's really important if they aren't successful we don't pay you. Oh, that gets their attention, you know, no revenue, no pay, can sell anything, no revenue. Okay, so it's very important. Sales is very important. Figuring out how to design a product that somebody can sell is very important. And so I used to have a deal with the sales and marketing group I said listen, here's the deal; “I will not build stuff that you can't sell as long as you don't sell stuff that I can't build. That was our deal.

Then I said, I remember being confused about sales and marketing so I went to the Vice President of Marketing at MCI and I said, so you know what's the difference and he says, Look, this is easy. The marketing guy is responsible for telling the sales guy where to go and what to say when he gets there. And that's, you know, a very simple formulation of the difference between the two jobs. And of course the sales guys job is to figure out what are the problems that the customer has that I have a solution to. How do I solve my customers problem this is not order taking this is problem solving. And it takes real skill, especially if you don't have all the pieces that will solve your customers problems, they have to create your own case or partner with in order to get this to work.

KATZ And yet you still I mean there have been times where: as an example I have a meeting with a CTO at a very large global pharmaceutical company. And he says to me, I find it ridiculous because actually technology is so far in advance of the rest of the organisation. You know the technology is already there, just don't get it and I'm like, well, you're talking about, as you say a system. This is not a machine. Therefore, all of the functionality that you can delive …r if people don't get it internally or externally then

VINT: Not gonna go anywhere. That's right. I mean, this stuff doesn't sell itself. So figuring out. Oh, in fact, let me tell you what another one of my favourite quotes, the guy that runs the Gallup company Jim Clifton, is one of these folksy guys think of gaming as being just sort of run of the mill kind of the guy right well guess what he's like the guy that you meet in the bar, who's playing cards. And so as you know I don't really know. He's holding a deck of cards he says you know I don't know very much about this game. You know I think there's a card missing here. So this That's Jim.

So, Clifton points out that the purpose of a company is to create and keep a customer. That's what the purpose of the company is. And if you can't do that you don't have a company. Forget about this this shareholder crap and everything. The purpose of a company is to create and keep a customer. And if you add to that, and you ask, you ask yourself is what I'm doing today creating a customer and keeping the customer., you have a pretty high probability of keeping your business going.

KATZ: Right. And until I spent a lot of time with organizations where they talk about customer centricity, they don't really know whether they're making customers happy or not.

VINT: This is like infrastructure, you know infrastructure is something you pay no attention to until it doesn't work right. The electricity goes out the roads are jammed there's no water, or it's polluted. All of those things we don't pay any attention to until they aren't available, and then suddenly we realize, holy moly, that was pretty important. Now what. So yes, you're quite right. You really need to be sincere about customer centricity. You really have to want to do everything you can to keep your customer happy.

KATZ: And that has to start inside. And I think this is one of the things that obviously Google does quite well, is to make sure that you've got a culture where the employees are empowered to be the be**st they can be, or as much as possible. Because by doing that, that means that wherever the customer touches the edges of your company, the customer feels that

VINT: SO there's an interesting challenge here. By the way I am more sensitive to in this space, this discussion now than I used to be because I'm now in the cloud sales department at Google. I'm there to facilitate the sale of our cloud products. And so I'm even more sensitive now to the ups and downs and ins and outs and pressures of sales. And one of the tricky problems is figuring out how do I give flexibility to my sales people without necessarily having them discount the stuff so I don't have any profit in my business. So there's a really big balancing act there about how you meet quota and offer things to the customer sometimes discounts, without putting yourself out of business settings have to be an interesting challenge.

KATZ: Yeah,I bet. Gosh, That's a whole new challenge. I guess that you approach it in the same way that you've approached all of the rest of the projects, which is looking at your parts of the organization as part of a system.

VINT: That’s exactly right. You listen to the customers and new feedback back as directly as you can to engineering and development. When I was doing MCI Mail for MCI I had a weekly meeting with the people who were serving the customers of the MCI Mail system it was a commercial email service, and they would call it was a help desk and I wanted to talk to the people who were at the help desk to hear what the problems were that customers were having because they wanted that to feed back into the engineering design of the system, or into operations. And so that was the most valuable time of the week was into what the customers were saying to the Help Desk.

KATZ: Yeah, and of course this is, this is exactly what beep is about is about if you can hear, where the little challenge are, where the needs are where the problems are, and you can bring smart people around them to find solutions to those little tiny problems. Then actually, you've got some chance of being successful as a system. I know that we've got a few minutes left and I know that you had a story that you wanted to share about your dear lady wife, and I'd love to hear it.

VINT: So it's it's not a long story but it's an amazing one. Seigried was born with normal hearing but at age three, she had spinal meningitis, all over hearing went away. For 50 years she was totally deaf she didn't learn sign language learning delivery. She retained her speech which was amazing. Given that she could hear herself. and she went through college, she was an interior designer classes in architecture, managed to deal with all that then we got married in 1966 so this will be our 55th anniversary this year. So, in 1996, she gets on the internet, and starts poking around looking into cochlear implants, and she finds somebody in Israel, who can tell her what the state of the art is now, and then points her to Johns Hopkins University, where she goes to be tested to see whether or not she would be a likely recipient for a cochlear implant which at that time in 96 was still right on the very edge of being medical therapy,. It was still slightly experimental. So she gets her first implant in 1996 . Takes 45 minutes to do the operation that she comes home and waits a couple of weeks for everything to heal then she goes back to Johns Hopkins, and I wasn't there for that but they activated the speech processor. About 20 minutes after they turned it on, she picked up the phone and called me for, and we had a conversation over the phone for the first time in 30 years of married life. So that was pretty astonishing.

Then she got home and I discovered that I had a 53 year old teenager. I couldn't get her off the phone, she would take anything, you know. I was a senior VP and my at the time, and at&t calls and tried to get her to switch to at&t So she picked up her phone, and discovered that whoever was calling was in India, she say well you know your English is really good. Where did you learn that ? So she'd go on for half an hour and this on the other end with at the end, say, so you're going to switch to at&t and she said well no, my husband's a senior VP and MCI but thanks for calling" Then she decided that she wanted to hear words that she hadn't heard before, while she was deaf. So she called the library members now on the phone now. She's calling the librarian says can I sign up for record books for the blind. And they said, Sure, no problem name address phone number. Now you're blind Aren't you? She say : “no I'm deaf.” And there's this long pause and they're trying to figure out how is that going to work. He makes herself, listen to 500 books on tape to hear words that she hadn't heard before, didn't know how to pronounce. Then she says, I'm not going to miss anything, so she gets patch cords so she can plug into Sony Walkman tto listen to books on faith. The patch cord works on the airplane so she can plug in and listen to a movie and not hear the screaming kid two feet away because it's going into her speech processor. She gets an FM transmitter receiver so she can go to lectures and hear them from 150 feet away. She gets an optical receiver so she can go into a movie theatre and pick up the sound that way into the speech processor She gets a little microphone on the end of the cable which He clipped to somebody's lapel so she's walking down in an art gallery with somebody, thanking her she's can hear what that person is saying. So, this incredibly aggressive determination that no decibel will go undetected.

So the thing I want to emphasise is that she repeatedly forces herself to listen. Knowing that is, she's not going to get all of it but if she doesn't make her brain practice with her new equipment, it won't learn how to make it work. And so you have to be very disciplined to do that and she's really good at it. She just recently had a lens replacement and she's doing the same thing, making herself use the new lens in order to get her brain, to accommodate to this new piece of equipment

KATZ: Beautiful! Technology is I mean I can't even imagine what it would be like to suddenly have the gift of hearing when so many of the people I deal with Actually, don't listen

VINT: Two things about Seigfried of them is where after she got her first implant, we would take walks and the birds would be out there, and she would say “I heard that “and so I wanted to write her biography called, I heard that is, but then more recently she turns it off. You know and so she's in peace and quiet during the day when she's reading, and it's rather amusing, you know. She came home the first thing she said to me after she got her implant working was I don't have to look at you anymore. Then she turned it off and said I don't have to listen to you either.

VINT I can't thank you enough. It's been an absolute pleasure, Loads of stuff I hadn't heard before. One of the reasons I'm doing this is because for some reason I've met the most extraordinary people in my life. And I feel like I have conversations one to one, or sometimes one to two, or sometimes at dinner. Those stories want to be shared. And so that's why we're here. So the last thing that we need to do is to decide what should thus episode of humans leading humans be called.

VINT: Oh, that's interesting. What should we call this. Ah, this is patience and persistence counts.

KATZ: Love it. Patience and persistence counts, It shall be thank you so much, Vint. I really appreciate your time, and my mind is blown

VINT: Sorry I messed up your, your format. But sometimes, this, these kinds of stories don't necessarily fit into little short anecdotes, because they're sagas, every one of these is a saga and sagas have to be told.

KATZ: Yeah, and as soon as we started formats are only useful if you can break them. As soon as you started, I felt no. I just want to listen. Thank you so much. This has been amazing.

VINT: You’re welcome. It was fun to chat and I wish you well with this whole series.

KATZ: Thank you.

VINT: Bye for now.

KATZ : Holy moly. I honestly feel so honored to have that conversation with Brent and I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I did. As you probably know by now, I fiercely believe that everything can be better. Always, So I really want to hear your thoughts.

What did you love? what resonated? What could I do better? What do you want more of. Who do you think deserves to join our list of imaginal guests.

So if you have suggestions or comments, or of course, a story that will inspire listeners in next week's episode, please. The us on Twitter at @beepmindshift

Next week's guest is Harley DuBois, who is the chief culture officer of the Burning Man Project. I cannot wait I genuinely cannot wait to find out which of her many many insights his story should choose to share. There is so much to learn from that woman. You have been listening to humans, leading humans towards a future of work, that works for people.

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