>> Everybody, welcome back to Squat by Teams and Tech. Remember I said I introduced our guest here today. George, would you like to introduce yourself? >> Yes. Hello, my name is George Friedman. I'm an IT Capital Markets Financial Services, Cloud Infrastructure, Sales and Business Development Executive. I've been in the business now for about 20-some odd years, and I've seen some phenomenal changes and growth and technology and the impact it's had on markets and the economy. >> Looking forward to sharing whatever perspective or experience that I've had with you. >> Absolutely. For those who don't know, quickly introduce myself, everybody, I'm Jeremy from Squatify, Team Productivity Accelerator. Teams like Salesforce, Sanofi, and Enbow, you Squatify to identify team issues, take actions recommended by the Squatify team to coach, build engagement, accountability, track improvements a month over month, and achieve a 10 percent increase in productivity, 11 percent growth in team engagement, 13 percent uplift of performance year over year, and finally, 60 percent improvement in happiness at work. George, let's dive right into it. Can you tell us a little bit more about your roles and responsibilities and the roles and responsibilities of your team as well? >> Well, depending on which role and or which position you're asking about, I've been engaged in high-end enterprise sales across the spectrum of platform as a service, software as a service, infrastructure, digital transformation, migration to cloud, in my most recent iteration as a cloud exec, business development, ecosystem development, things of that nature. Prior to that, I was in the capital markets trading, trading systems, market data, pricing, valuation, risk analytics, things of that nature. But the algos came in, the dog pools came in and basically, that whole business was laid as under by technology. So as many people have had to do, I had to reinvent myself to the cloud, which is what everybody was rushing for. So that's how I got into infrastructure after about 20 years, in capital markets technology, data, software. >> I'm curious, how has technology affected how you and your team does sales? >> In every way, what we had sold for many, many years, 40 years or more, was upended by technology, by digital data feeds, high-speed, consolidated feeds, certainly by the emergence of the algos, which disintermediated thousands of human beings who were manually, effectively doing what the over a period of time, what the algos do in milliseconds or even faster. The nature of trading, which is where I was focused for many years, has been completely set upside down by the algos, by what are called dog pools or private liquidity portals competing with the exchanges, competing with the brokers for matching trades together. The high-speed feeds that are processed and parsed by very high-speed servers, co-located at the exchange's data center have, again, disintermediated hundreds of human traders and trading operations people that used to be on trading floors all over Wall Street, both on the buy side and the sell side. Today, it's a completely, completely different environment than it was 20 years ago, certainly as far as the world of trading that I was so familiar with is concerned. >> I'm curious because you do have this unique experience here, with disruptive technologies, right, and every change? >> Yes, very much. >> I feel like how do you see the current changing landscape with AI, and the new machine learning technologies, and how that may, given your experience in the past, how do you foresee, what do you see happening in the future, what kind of preparations do you think that folks are taking or, yeah, I guess just because a lot of folks, we're just sort of in the middle of it. We don't really know what's up ahead necessarily or how to prepare for it. I'm just curious if you have any thoughts on that. >> I do. I have a lot of thoughts on it. I fully expect technologists to exploit the promise, the potential of cognitive AI and machine learning, as again, as it applies to a market space that I'm very familiar with, which is trading and investment management, portfolio management, risk analytics and so on. Again, it's the same ideas I mentioned before. High-speed servers, hundreds of cores, look what you see, data mining, cryptocurrencies at the data center, when you apply that to portfolio risk optimization, market simulation, risk modeling, and so on, they could do that infinitely faster and more accurately than human beings. I fully expect that in the next 10 years, as AI matures, as AI progresses, that that capability will be exploited to further disseminate human traders, human portfolio managers, risk managers, and so on. Like I said, if you're running a stress test, a market simulation, a model against all these different risk potentials, and you're trying to match orders together, you've already seen the Algos and the high-speed servers collocated to the exchanges, replacing human traders and operations people. Now, it's going to be the portfolio managers who make the decisions that are going to be, in my opinion, increasingly at risk and disintermediate by AI and ML cognitive learning machines. Interesting. I wonder if, similar to how, as the technology landscape card is shifting, you transitioned into infrastructure and into cloud, that similar thing will happen where folks will transition further into AI, or, as you said, taking advantage of what AI can offer. New roles, and new, yeah, I guess, new roles popping up. But I wanted to switch gears real quick and ask you a little bit about your sales team leadership experience. This is something I like to ask everybody, I speak with on the podcast. So I wanted to ask you, how do you measure and track your team's productivity and performance? And what's your process for driving consistent execution and improving a month over month? Well, soon we'll use all the dashboards from Salesforce. You know, it's been that way for the last several roles that I've been in. We've used Salesforce on-demand dashboards, you know, that we custom designed to track, you know, the life cycle of deals, you know, from, you know, from discovery to cash and so on. So, you know, that's a big part of it. There are still manual processes that are employed. Standard spreadsheet, you know, excel models that we've written, or that were written in other places that I've worked at, that also do some degree of tracking. But CRM is clearly the most accurate, the most widely distributed tool for doing that. Got it, got it. With the teams that we work with at Squatify, we have these three pillars of success for driving team execution. It's the three teams of clarity, climate, and competence. Clarity, for example, is, you know, does everybody understand, is aligned on the vision, able to reach each other. And the climate is, does everybody have the right environment, be productive to collaborate, help each other out. And the competence is, do they have the skills to execute, right? And also the soft skills to work together. And I'm curious, do you have any strategies or tactics you use, you know, one of ones with your teammates? You know, how do you align the team on your vision? And, yeah, I guess just make sure everybody's doing okay. You know, I'm old-school. You're very honest here, Jeremy. I'm an old-school guy. I still believe in doing it the old-fashioned way. Person to person. You have, you know, weekly meetings to align everybody with the mission, with the goal, what the objectives are, how to reach those objectives, how to overcome obstacles to meeting those objectives. And I still believe the best way to do that is by example, from leadership, and doing it in, well, either in person, if you're still in person, or remotely by a Zoom, but doing it, you know, by way of expression. So that everyone knows what the goals are, how those goals will be measured, what we're doing to get around obstacles that we may or may not want to run into. And you know what else, Jeremy? The big thing is identifying the unintended consequences of a strategy or of an action. Everyone, of course, accounts for intended consequences by definitions, the unintended ones that you have to be most aware of. So I try to dive very hard into what are the potential unintended consequences of an action. But I do that really in person with the team. Usually I'm zoomed as we're all spread out around the country, and I still feel that's the best way to do it. Okay, I have two faults to what you just said is very important. The first is, can you, what's some of the most common obstacles that you find, you know, your team members facing when you're sitting down with a modern one? And what is your strategy to overcome those, you know, the most common obstacles? Of course, it's dependent on what the obstacles are. I wonder if you've seen the most. Like, what's the one that you know always pops up? Well, in business development, depending on the market I was in or what business, it's usually competition against an intractable competitor. Bloomberg and AWS come to mind as dominant in the spaces they're in that I've competed with. What I was in the trading system business, Bloomberg was omnipotent, still is really in that space. So getting around and competing with Bloomberg when I was in that space was probably the one issue that came up most frequently, both internally and certainly from the customer base. Now, of course, that, you know, that in the cloud world, it's AWS, which dominates the cloud space, although to a lesser degree than the ones did because of the rise of Asia and some, you know, and more of a focus from smaller competitors, Google, IBM, Oracle, cloud, right, spend some time. How do you? I was just saying, which your team members to overcome that or to what you were saying before, how do you lead by example to, you know, become this obstacle, the competitors? Well, yeah, you got to be realistic. You know, I've always believed in being realistic and not just following the company line blindly, because that usually doesn't get you anywhere. You know, for me to have said when I was at Thompson Reuters and ran various sales teams at Thompson Reuters over many years, said, just, you know, get over through Bloomberg, it wasn't going to happen. I know it and my people know it. So, you know, it's, you can't just blindly go about throwing out the corporate line of, well, find a way, you know, that's why we pay you, you know, you have to stick to what your strengths are and not play against an, an immovable object. In other words, I'm saying is that if you're going head to head, for example, with elbows or that are operating at some microsecond speed and you're, and you're operating your selling services that are dependent on human intervention at greater than, you know, seconds speed against elbows that are, a fraction of that, and you're just not going to win. If you're trying to match orders, which is a commodity, you know, on the trading floor, or, you know, upstairs, as we used to call it, at a broke dealer more than standard, more than Stanley Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, whatever it is, and you're up against a boutique trading firm that's matching the orders directly at the exchange data center co-located, let's say in Chicago, New York at the Magic Engines, for NASDAQ, New York at the same, you're not going to win. So, you got to go around that. You got to find where your niche is, where your capabilities, your probabilities, your, well, profit margins, so on, are most, are best aligned with the reality of the market and go after that. There's no point in going head to head with Bloomberg for market data feeds when the customer's entire portfolio is benchmarked against Bloomberg, or is dependent on order flow that comes in on the Bloomberg messaging system. You're not going to win. So, experience has taught me, find your niche and stick to it. Know your strengths, know your competitor's strengths, and when it's very, very clear, the market has made it clear that you're not going to win head to head, go around and find another area where you have a better shot. Find your niche and play your strengths. And, apologies, I want to follow up on something you said earlier. There was a second point that I want to ask for some examples on. I don't know if you might remember. It was a topic, the previous topic, the end of the previous topic, you mentioned something I really wanted to jump on top of, but it was after the obstacles. Yes, your team, but yes. Do do do. Anyways, I guess, let's plow ahead. So, I'm curious to hear, you know, throughout your experience, what would you say is your number one career learning in team leadership? My number one issue in team leadership. I'm sorry, what? A career learning. What's your number one career learning? Well, it's to accept human nature for what it is and as it is. You know, you know, we're all people, we're all human beings with needs and wants and strengths and weaknesses and faults and assets and so on. You have to accept reality for what it is, accept human nature and the infallibilities that people inherently have for the reality that it represents, for the reality of what it is. And I've learned from experience that if you toe an unrealistic company line or industry line against reality of human nature, you're going to fail. Do you have a specific story about that or is this related to what you were talking about before with competition? Well, I mean, the competition is an example of that. I mean, yeah, I mean, I do. For example, I guess we could say when I was an oracle, an oracle cloud, and I'll give you a little more reason without mentioning names. The company I'm with now, you know, we provide managed services, co-location host and digital transformation migration to the cloud and cloud managed services for hybrid public and private cloud. In that capacity, we are often forced to compete with our partners, which in this case is the other hyperscalers AWS in particular. So we ran into an initiative last year for a very large data center migration co-location project for a very large, very well-known company that was looking to repatriate across multiple data centers back to a private cloud environment. Well, we knew we were going to be competing against AWS, which of course dominates this business and has data center capacity far beyond and above what we could provide. But, and I knew that going in, I also knew that they had the distinct advantage of being able to provide hundreds of times in compute capacity, storage capacity, on-demand scale that we could. This was a deal that was clearly structured for an AWS or perhaps a Microsoft Asia and not for the nature of what we do. But the company, you know, insisted that we compete, of course, as we should, and we spent six months competing for a deal that I knew we clearly were not going to win, and we didn't. But it took up so much time, so much resource. And even though I was probably a little bit reticent to say to my management, hey, what are we doing here? We're not going to win. This isn't our sweet spot. It's absolutely, the RFP was clearly geared towards AWS, which was the incumbent. We're not going to win. We shouldn't dedicate hundreds of man hours to this. And yet we did. We lost and less than learned. You know, sometimes it's better to know beforehand what the reality is than to pursue an opportunity blind. Sometimes it isn't. But, you know, that should always be a consideration, which is to know where your strengths are and where they are not, and to conduct your business accordingly. That's very difficult, isn't it? Or is it not a very challenging thing for you knowing what the reality is before it happens, or being able to foresee? Or do you have a process for calculating, okay, well, here's what we know now, and here's what's most likely to happen. I'm curious, how do you do that? How do you see, you know, it's not going to be else. You know it when you see it. You know it when you see it. It's when you read RFP that is clearly above your head. I guess it'd be like when you were in college, remember you would audit a class in college, you see, but if you wanted to take it, if you went in there, and it was right years above and beyond anything, you had any knowledge you have experienced with, or a ability to understand, even think that I'm probably in the first hour of sitting there, and it's probably not a bad idea to look somewhere else. And you'll know whether or not you're in over your head or not. You can say that about business, and you can say it about your personal life, about a lot of things. And that was an example where I spent many hours, and you know, my team, various parts, various members of my team spent many hours, you know, chasing this opportunity because it was lost, it was very big. But, you know, for no behavior at all, when that time could have been better spent, perhaps I'll swear. So it's just, you know, the reality, there were times when you have to accept reality and face value for what it is. I got it. I appreciate the analogy. That makes a lot of sense. George, this is the end of the podcast. The last last question here is, who should reach out to you and what's the best way to reach you? I mean, I'm a GS Friedman 55 at Yahoo.com. If I could be of any help, certainly feel free to reach out GS Friedman, F-R-I-E-D-M-N 55 at Yahoo.com. Awesome. Thank you so much for speaking with us today. Everybody, thanks for listening to another episode. We'll see you all next time. Thank you.
