Cloud Therapy: EP 006 – Interview with Cloud Expert Brian Gracely

June 10, 2016 Aerocom

Cloud Therapy with Brian Gracely

Your host, Mike Smith, chats with acclaimed cloud expert, Brian Gracely, co-host of hit podcast, The Cloudcast. Brian recounts fascinating stories about his career, including his most difficult moment, what he did to attract praise from his bosses, a time when a boss gave him constructive criticism and a story from an inbound call at Cisco that will make your day.

For more Cloud Therapy,  you can also find us on iTunes and Stitcher!

There are hundreds of cloud providers. Why not skip to the top 3 for your company’s requirements? Click below.

See below for a full transcript:

  Mike:     Okay, IT Nation. Today, I have a special guest for you. His name is Brian Gracely. Most of you know who he is, but if you don’t, he’s actually one of the faces of the professional IT community. He’s the co-host of The Cloudcast podcast, which is the number 1 cloud computing podcast on iTunes, and he’s a long time industry expert. We have a really cool conversation about things like what’s the worst experience he’s ever had in his IT career, how he’s gone about getting praise from his superiors from great work that he’s done, and also some really fun stuff like what’s the strangest or coolest thing he’s ever seen in the workplace.

Now, this isn’t our typical subject for Cloud Therapy, but I think it’s really important nonetheless. Everybody goes through go and hard experiences in IT and when we share one another’s stories, I think we all learn a lot. Brian is definitely someone who’s been around IT a long time and knows a whole heck of a lot. I think listening to his stories is a little bit motivational to all of us. So, I think it is relevant and is a lot of fun.

Before we get to the interview, I want to offer you, again, our free gift that we do on every podcast. It’s the gift we’ve been giving away all month. It’s the list of best questions for shopping cloud VMs or public cloud. To get the list of questions, all you have to do is text the word “CLOUDVM” to the number 44-222 and we will send you that list of questions.

Now, there’s like twenty-five of them or so, and it took me a ton of time to get these questions. How I came about finding all of them is I called all the individual cloud VM service providers that we represent and I asked them how their service differentiates from their competition. Then, I took that information and, basically, turned it in to a question that you can ask yourself. Again, it’s a great list of questions that will really help you get to the right providers a lot faster. To get that list, all you have to do is text the word “CLOUDVM” to the number 44-222.

Welcome, Brian.

Brian:    Hey, Mike. Thanks for having me on. Excited to be on one of the very first shows.

Mike:     Awesome. Likewise. If you could take a minute or so to tell us a little bit about yourself both professionally and personally.

Brian:    Yeah, sure. My name is Brian Gracely. My day job, I’m the lead cloud analyst for a research and analyst firm called Wikibon. It’s based out here on the east coast. I’m about twenty plus years in the industry, spent twelve/thirteen years at Cisco, so I’ve got to ride the growth of the Internet wave – lot of fun over there. I shifted gears, spent quite a bit of time the last, probably, six or seven years in data centers, so I worked at companies like NetApp, and Virtustream, and EMC, and some others. And, like you said, I co-host Cloudcast, which is a show that focuses on different aspects of cloud computing. Myself and my co-host, Aaron, have been doing it for about five years.

Mike:     That’s awesome. So, you guys have been doing podcasting longer than most. Anything that you’ve taken away over all those years of podcasting?

Brian:    Yeah. You know, we started it because, like you said, we’re not in Silicon Valley, I’m out in Raleigh, North Carolina, which is a technology center, but it’s, by no means, the Bay Area. We really just wanted to find a way to get engaged with people a little bit deeper, like, what do they know, what kind of cool things they’re working on.

I think we learned from doing the podcast is the world has become very community-oriented. People are interested in talking about it, interested in having conversations. If you’re willing to put the information back out in to the community and be part of it, there are lots of opportunity to learn, and meet people, and stuff like that.

Mike:     Absolutely. That’s cool. Tell us a little bit about yourself personally.

Brian:    Yeah, sure. So, married, I’ve got two daughters, my wife and I spend a huge amount of our time chasing them around to gymnastics meets – they do very competitive gymnastics. My background, I played sports in college. I was a baseball player in college. I got in to technology, kind of, accidentally. I was really a finance person and marketing person in college. I thought I was going to work in Wall Street.

Had a friend say, “Hey, if the Wall Street thing doesn’t work out when you’re doing interviews, try out technology.” I got an interview, at the time, with a reseller, a [Inaudible 00:06:57] reseller, and didn’t really know much about technology other than having used email and some stuff. Got involved in sales and really loved the competitiveness of it. I haven’t played sports for a long time, I liked the competitiveness of technology, I liked that it moved fast, and I’ve, sort of, been involved with it ever since.

Mike:     Okay. Before we get to the good stuff and the fun questions, what I like to do is start with a question that everybody can relate to. Everybody’s had a hard time at some point in their career. So, could you please share with us one of your most difficult moments you’ve ever faced in IT?

Brian:    Yeah. I think, everybody, if you’ve been around IT long enough, you’ve been through some really good ups and some occasional downs. For me, personally, I’ve been at Cisco for about twelve years. In 2008 when the economy was going through some tough times, I walked in to work one morning on a Monday and I got an email that said, “Hey, your group’s been eliminated. You guys have a couple of weeks to see if you can find something else.”

Mike:     Wow.

Brian:    It was, kind of, one of those moments where I had spent my whole career, at that point, in the networking part of the world at a very large company and, all of a sudden, you say, “Well, wait a second…” you know, it felt like family, it felt like the place you’re going to be. It forced you to think about, number one, where else do you go? Because you don’t think you know a lot of other companies. Number two, it really makes you realize how much your network of people that you know is probably, at least, as important if not more important than the technology you know. So, for me, it was rethinking where I worked and figuring out where do you go forward from there. It was probably my biggest challenge.

Mike:     Wow. How much time did you really have to find something new? I can imagine there’s a lot of people out there listening who’ve had the same thing happen where you’re completely blindsided. You walk in one morning and they’re eliminating your department, or your location, or something like that, and my immediate thought is, gosh, are you giving you any type of severance where you have a couple of weeks or giving you the type of – How much time did you have did you have to find a new job?

Brian:    Yeah. I think, if I remember right, they gave us three months of severance, which was very generous. For me, I think, I went home, spoke to my wife. We both went through the shock of it. It’s like losing a family member. You, kind of, don’t know what to do at first. For me, I immediately started trying to make phone calls because you realize, you know, when you have bills to pay and mortgages, and other things, ninety days goes very quickly, so started making a lot of phone calls, started looking around what was available.

It’s tough, it’s tricky when go through that, especially, when your company goes through something large, because your friends and colleagues at your company tends to be your closest allies or your closest network, and you start figuring out, “Okay. Where’s the rest of my network? What else was out there?”

Yeah, there was some panic. I think, you go through those horrified stages immediately. The trick was to, sort of, say “Okay, what else is available?” Then, once you start figuring out there are other things available, then you start getting back to: Okay, but where do I want to go? What’s not just taking a job? Or, what’s not just paying the bills? Where’s the thing that you’re going to be happy at? That was, sort of, the second phase for me, which probably kicked in after a couple of weeks once you had options on the table.

Mike:     Awesome. How long did it take you to land a good job where you wanted to be?

Brian:    I want to say it probably took about six to eight weeks because not only do you have to go and interview, and talk to different companies, but, companies, they don’t tend to hire people overnight. It’s not like getting a job scooping ice cream or serving fries. You go through the typical interview process which tends to be five/six/seven people and they schedule it, and… Again, that’s my point of when you think you’ve got three months, some people tend to go, “Oh, well I’ll just take some time off. I’ll take a long vacation. I’ll do whatever.” You’ve got to realize that hiring process at other places take a while and you’ve got to factor that in.

Yeah. For me, I want to say I, probably, went pretty close to that ninety days or sixty to ninety days. Part of it was just, you know, the company that I went to, I ended up going across the street to NetApp, which was another technology company, but just the process of changing took quite a while.

Mike:     Wow. Yeah, that’s some good advice. I can definitely see that where ninety days would fly by fast. If you don’t get started quickly, if you do take that week or two of vacation, and then take a week or two to, kind of, regroup after the vacation, that might leave you in a tough spot in the, maybe, couple of weeks of having to go on unemployment or something. But, yeah, that’s some good advice.

With NetApp, how did you end up there? Was it somebody you knew there or was it a recruiter that helped you get an interview there?

Brian:    It was a little bit of both. I had a couple of ex-Cisco colleagues… I mean, RTP or the Raleigh Area is not the Bay Area, but there is pockets of technology. NetApp happened to be, literally, directly across the street. I had a couple of colleagues that I had worked with that had gone over there. You know, I reached out to different people and said, “Hey, what’s available?” They, sort of, highlighted this.

They were looking for a new group and they were starting to move out of – focused away from storage, focused more on, kind of, broader data center, virtualization, cloud computing, and I thought, well, I don’t really have a lot of experience in that space, but I am pretty good at dealing with new transitions, dealing with new technologies. So, I thought, well, if nothing else, I’m going to give it a shot and, sort of, tell them that I know how to learn fast. Hopefully, some of my Cisco, sort of, system level experience was going to be beneficial to them. Yeah, it was good to have a friend that was going to, sort of, help me – I don’t know – get my resume higher up the stack for a recruiter, but then I had to still go through the full recruiting process.

Mike:     Oh, cool. That’s good. I think, those are some good takeaways for anybody who’s listening who is in a similar situation or might be facing something in the near future. So, thanks for sharing that painful moment.

Moving from that little bit of a downer to something a little bit more fun is – Tell us a time where you had a boss give you some positive feedback and what instigated that positive feedback.

Brian:    Yeah. For me, I think, the times when I get positive feedback tends to be… A lot of times people will get them at the end of a project. So, you finish a project or you closed a big campaign, whatever it might have been, and people tend to go, “That was great. Good job.” The ones for me tend to be the follow up to that where you’ve done a good job with something and you’ve earned somebody’s trust, or you helped solve a problem that felt like, “Yeah, this is going to be tough to fix,” and they come to you with the next idea. They come to you with the next thing that says, “Hey, I don’t really know where this could go, but I have an idea. Would you be willing to run with it?”

In my case, recently, probably about a year ago, I had done some things for – I was working at EMC, another company in the storage space and had done some stuff for the person who was the CMO at the time. I had helped them with some demonstrations, helped them with some keynote presentations and a couple of projects. They, literally, called me on a Friday afternoon and said, “Hey, I have an idea. We had talked to a customer. I have an idea about something. Could you just, kind of, brainstorm what could come out of this?”

It was, kind of, an area they felt where they were a little bit vulnerable in the market place. In this case, it was around open source software, which is very different for any commercial company. They said, “Hey, spend an hour, give me an idea. That ended up turning out to be something that became a brand new project, a brand new group. I got funded and we started up, basically, doing open source at EMC, but it was based on not so much just purely feedback, but, kind of, having built some trust with an executive to the point where they said the next time I have a, kind of, not a half-baked idea, but the beginning of an idea, I might come to you as the person that might be able to help fulfill that and make it bigger. That’s always been kind of cool.

Mike:     That is really a cool way to receive positive feedback – getting their trust with a new project or another project that’s even bigger than the last, or something they’re trusting you with more. That’s a great angle that you took there.

Can you drill down a little bit? Would you mind sharing with us what, specifically, that you did with helping them with their keynote presentation? Was it something where you’re providing some technical knowledge or was it something you’re helping them out with the actual presentation itself and doing Prezi, something like that?

Brian:    Yeah. In this case, there were really two projects that led to this. The first one was, probably a couple of years ago, they said, “Hey, we want to do this showcase at EMC world,” so essentially, we want to showcase something at the big corporate customer event. They said, “We want to build an entire data center on the show floor, live, in forty-eight hours.

Mike:     Wow.

Brian:    That concept of… If you’ve ever dealt with a big trade show, you know how much unions are involved, you know how static and rigid things are, and space is always tight. It ended up being about a four or five-month project that we figured out a way to pull off. We had to use some smoke and mirrors to make that happen in terms of getting big, physical equipment in there, but that was, kind of, one of the starting points.

The second one was, at about a month’s notice, we found out that we’re going to give a keynote address at Oracle Open World. So, it was a non-EMC event, but we were a big sponsor. We’re going to get to keynote after Larry Ellison at Oracle Open World, and they wanted to put together a demonstration, a technical demonstration that was going to be fun but also inform people about this new technology that we had.

So, we had about a month to put something together that couldn’t fail because there was going to be 10,000 people there live. I ended up getting to be on stage along with the CMO. They gave the presentation, you know, they said, “Hey, let’s go take a look at this technology,” spent four or five minutes on stage, and pulled this thing off, got some laughs, got a lot of good press out of it. So, the opportunity to not only do well in the project, but make other people look good and make your company look good turned out to be a pretty good building block for that trust.

Mike:     Yeah, absolutely. In terms of takeaways for everybody listening, I think that it sounds to me like… The takeaway I’m getting is you’re presented with an opportunity, and you really took it, and ran with it, and did the most with it in terms of, you know, you just mentioned you got some laughs or the presenter got some laughs. Is there any way that you, kind of, dissected it down and… I’m thinking of, you know, if you’re preparing something that’s going to be a presentation in front of a lot of people and it’s not something that you’ve done a ton of times. How did you figure out ways you’d add humor in it and really make it a great presentation?

Brian:    Yeah. I think the first step, and I see this a lot with people, is the idea that came to us or the fragment of an idea was literally just that. It was, “Hey, we want you to do something,” and you’re going to have this much time or this much space. I think, a lot of times for people, your initial reaction is, and mine was the same way, was you either think, “That’s crazy,” like there’s no way that can happen. It, sort of, goes against physics, or the budget will be too big, or whatever. So, you, sort of, have to go, “Well, okay. Let’s step back a second. What’s possible?”

The other part of it is you start, sort of, saying, “Okay. They didn’t give us any requirements.” Well, if they didn’t give you any requirements, a lot of times that means they don’t have any preconceived notions. They’re just, sort of, saying, “I want to rely on you to come up with something creative. Then, what you realize is, at least, what I realized, was the creative process ended up making this thing happen. We came to the table with two or three ideas, the people that we’re working with to build this, sort of, said, “I like that,” “I don’t like this,” “I like part of that, but can you make it bigger?” That part was, sort of, interesting.

But, again, it was the – don’t freak out. A lot of times people have these, sort of, half-baked ideas and they come to you for a reason, because they think somewhere, if you have enough time to think about it, you might be able to come up with something, kind of, cool. Then, it became, kind of, an interative thing. I think, what we started with didn’t turn out how it ended, but we ended up making a demonstration video that was trying to showcase this database technology and analytics, and we, sort of, spun it to be – What if your haircut place had a mobile app that was going to know about the latest cool styles and help you figure out what you might project you might want to have next?  So, try to take something that was big, and complicated, and scary, and technical, and turn it in to something people do every day and can relate to.

Mike:     That’s awesome. I think those are some great takeaways for anybody listening when they’re handed a project, kind of, how to attack it.

Okay. Next question I have is: In your current position, when was the last time you communicated upward to your boss about some good work that you did? The reason I ask this is because I think that everybody is always doing a lot of good work – not everybody, but a lot of us are doing a lot of good work on a daily basis. The hard thing is how do you get your boss to notice all these good work that you’re doing that’s sometimes autonomous without it looking like you’re brownnosing, you’re really kissing up to him. So, can you take us back to a time where you’ve intentionally communicated upwards about some good work that you’ve done?

Brian:    Yeah. I was thinking about this question because you and I have talked about some of these things ahead of time. I think, for a lot of people, they’re normal upward communication tends to be, like, status updates. Maybe have a weekly meeting with your boss or you do a team meetings, and you do status updates, and they tend to be, you know, red, yellow, or green – “Hey, the project is going well.”

I think, what happens for a lot of people is they feel like those are the things they’re doing that communicate up. What I found is what you don’t want is necessarily like you so much communicating up, especially if what you’re trying to communicate is about yourself. If you’re trying to talk about your team… Do like football coaches do. When you win, give the players credit. When you lose, you take the blame. You’re trying to, sort of, hopefully, get something about yourself communicated upwards.

I always found that it comes across best when you’ve done with other people on your team and they’re going to be willing to, sort of, talk about it. I don’t mean that in the sense of, you know, you’d go and say, “Hey, Mary…” or Tom, or whoever, “Can you talk about me?” It tends to be those projects that you’ve worked with other people on the team, because what your leadership wants to see isn’t always just that you’ve done a good job, especially if you’re leading a team, but, from their position, they want to see that you’re doing that, sort of, 1+1=3 thing. They want to know that you’re working well with some other group and they don’t have to manage that. They go, “Great. You took the initiative to work with this other team. If the two of you work together, the company gets better leverage.”

Sometimes, what it boils down to is, let’s say you’re talking about something you’ve worked on, you want to incorporate how you did it with some other people and let them share their perspective as well. It comes across more from a leadership perspective and, I think, it comes across more as you’re being a very good team player, you took the initiative to go do some things that were cross-functional.

Mike:     Right.

Brian:    So, that’s what I found that works pretty successfully.

Mike:     That definitely makes sense. Is there a time that you can recall where you grabbed another team member in to a meeting or something, or you included somebody else in a conversation, in particular, that wasn’t necessarily the way it was going to go initially, or maybe somebody asked for your feedback and you, kind of, roped in some other people in to the conversation?

Brian:    Yeah. One of the things I like to do sometimes is, especially if I’m… In my current role, I don’t have a team. It’s more loose – a couple of individuals. So, in my last role, what I like to do… When somebody in my team had done well, I like to bring them to one of the next level status meetings. I like to say, “Hey, we’re on the agenda to say, to talk ten minutes about this project. You know what? I’m going to let the team lead talk about it. I want to give them the floor.” What it does is it showcases that there are people, it’s not just, sort of, this nebulous team, but it’s also a great change for them to get an experience of how do you present to upper level people in your company and coach them a little bit, teach them how to build those one or two slides that are really crisp, or how to communicate something in two or three minutes that they’re used to doing in ten or fifteen minutes.

So, I like to do that sometimes. It gives them some recognition, it gives them some confidence, and it gives them the ability, sometimes, if they stick around for a few minutes in a meeting, to, sort of, see what the upper level people thinking about, what are their problems. Sometimes, they’ll take that back and, sort of, internalize it, and try and fix it within the team.

Mike:     That’s a great idea. When you first brought that up in your previous position, when you first, kind of, presented that to them that you’re going to bring in somebody else, was management pretty receptive to that, that you’re going to bring in somebody else in to the meeting for ten minutes or so? Do they have any reservations about it or were they completely welcoming to that concept?

Brian:    I found in most cases, they’re pretty welcoming to it. As long as you set the ground rules with the person you’re bringing, like, “Look. Here’s our agenda, here’s our timeslot. We may be talking about things that really aren’t supposed to be shared, maybe, ay your level, so we may very well ask you to leave the room.” I think, as long you, sort of, have set the expectations with people about, you know, where’s the appropriate time to come in, what’s the appropriate way to act in it, I found that it is pretty well received.

I think, for a lot of companies that I’ve worked with, they want to know that you’re helping to develop talent. If you’re managing a team, you should be managing the team, but you should also be trying to develop the talent within that team. If you’re showcasing that there’s a deep bench or the team has a lot of talent, it’s not only great for you as the team leader or manager, but it’s great for the company because they know, “Hey, we’ve got people that are doing really interesting things.”

Mike:     Yeah. That’s great. I think, those are some good takeaways for everybody listening just to know how to, kind of, do that and how to bring somebody else in. I think, that’s a great angle to take because, just like you said, that’s a way for them to communicate the good work that you’re doing, but it’s not coming directly from you. That’s awesome.

Okay. So, taking it back to a little bit of a hard topic to talk about. One thing that, I think, that everybody has experienced at some point in their professional career is getting some negative feedback from a boss. It’s never something that anybody likes to get, but, at the same time, if your boss is really doing their job, I think it’s something that is inevitable.

What I’d like to do is just get everybody’s two cents on times that they’ve gotten some negative feedback from a boss and how they coped with it. So, would you share with us a time, at some point of your career, where you’ve gotten some negative feedback from a boss that was a little bit hard to take, and what it was regarding ,and how you dealt with it?

Brian:    Yeah. I’ll give you two and I’ll keep them brief. So, I think, everybody can, probably, relate to this one a little bit. We live in a very digital world these days. People are used to text messages, emails, Slack, whatever you’re means of communication is, and the great things about those tools is they’re easy to use, you can send information back and forth. The terrible thing about them is they really convey no emotion to them. So, you may very well send an email to somebody that, you know, you think you’re just responding with information, for example, and the person who reads it takes it as very curt, or harsh, or, you know, that you’re trying to – I don’t know – somehow I was trying to  show them up or something.

I’ve had some managers before say, “Hey, you know what? If you’ve got to send more than one email back and forth to try and get your point across, pick up the phone.” It’s the easiest way to make sure a situation doesn’t escalate if it wasn’t really intended to escalate. If there’s a nuanced point that really could be communicated with two minutes rather than a bunch of emails, do that. That’s my first tip. I’ve had a number of managers say, “Hey, look. Just pick up the phone. I know it’s easier to send that email and whatever, but the face to face thing, whether it’s face to face or on the phone, voice to voice, that will resolve a lot of situations that maybe have become conflicted.”

The other one that I’ve seen, and this relates to anybody who changed jobs, I talked early on about going from Cisco to NetApp and having had been at Cisco for a long time. I made the mistake that when they hired me, they said, “Hey, we’re looking for the types of skills that you have and the experience that you have. We hope you bring that to our company,” I made the mistake one time in a meeting and I said, “Well, at Cisco we did it this way.”

There are many companies where they don’t think they need your other company’s way of doing it. They think they do it very well. This isn’t a knock on NetApp, it just happened to be that scenario that I, sort of, learned my lesson to say, if you’re going to, kind of, convey experience, convey it in a way that’s not, “Hey, what I did before was better and you guys need to catch up.” It’s just, “Hey, here are some experience based on past experience,” and give people the opportunity to decide whether or not they want to indoctrinate them in to what they do or, you know, they may have had a bad experience with that previously. So, just be careful that your past experience and maybe the label that goes with it may not always be a good fit for the next place that you go to.

Mike:     Absolutely. When you said that in the meeting, did anybody pull you aside after the meeting and said, “Hey, that wasn’t really the best thing to say,” or is it something you just, kind of, felt as soon as you said it in the meeting that, “Uh oh. That didn’t go over well”?

Brian:    No, it was actually something that somebody explicitly came up to me after the meeting and said, “It’s great that you did that over at your last job, but, you know, you work here now and you need to be focused on what we do here.” Again, it wasn’t intended to be mean-hearted type of thing either way, but it was a good reminder. I’m glad somebody mentioned it to me.

Mike:     Yeah, absolutely.

Brian:    I may have said it again.

Mike:     Yeah, absolutely. I think those are the moments that we all dread that someone does that, pulls you aside, but, at the same time, sometimes, those things can give you a little bit of perspective on it. But, at the time, were you pretty upset that they said that to you, and were you defensive at all or was it something that you go, “You know what…?” you know, you, kind of, walked away and pretty quickly agreed with that?

Brian:    Well, to me… I had been at Cisco for a really long time. It was in my DNA. It was, probably, the first reminder to me or, sort of, first thing that jumped out to me that said, “Hey, things are different now. It’s not where you were before.” So, it was good, kind of, shook me up a little bit, woke me up a little bit and said, “Hey, you need to be…” I thought I was focused on being at the new place, but it really reinforced that, hey, things are new and you need to be part of the new place that you’re at.

Mike:     Yeah. That’s great. I think that’s some awesome information I think everybody can use, because, you know, almost everyone’s worked at multiple companies, and you’ve had those moments where you start seeing things that people are doing and going, “You know? They could do this better and we did it better at our last company,” and just really carefully word those statements.

Brian:    Right. Exactly.

Mike:     Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, moving on to a little bit of a lighter note and our last story that I’d love for you to share is… I think that anyone who’s worked in a company for a long time, whether it’s with people walking in to the business or just people sitting around you, we’ve all experienced some really interesting and funny things that we’ve seen. I’d love for you to share with us the strangest or funniest thing you’ve seen at work.

Brian:    Yeah. Man, there are so many of them. So, I’ll tell this story. Everybody’s got, sort of, a hero story, you know, somebody did this amazing thing. I think, sometimes, we forget, especially as you work in slightly larger companies, there are people that do stuff every day that, sometimes, are pretty amazing but get very little headline.

So, when I was at Cisco – I feel bad telling an old story, but it’s an amazing story. We were at Cisco, I was working in technical support, we were taking hundreds of phone calls a day from people trying to fix things. There was a colleague of mine who was taking the frontline calls, so, literally, the person who just calls up and says, “It’s broken. I don’t know what to do. Can you guys help me fix this?” and then they would route it to somebody. Somehow, the number they had called in, they had mistaken for a suicide hotline.

Mike:     Oh, man!

Brian:    So, this person who’s answering phone calls, you know, your router’s broken, your network’s broken, your LAN’s broken, blah, blah, blah, gets a phone call from somebody who says, “I just can’t take it anymore. I’m ending my life.”

Mike:     Oh, my gosh!

Brian:    This person stayed very calm. They said, “Sir…” They talked to them for about thirty or forty-five seconds, actually put them on hold, found somebody who could call 911 to get them, you know, to somehow connect this person, continued to take some phone calls because they had a job to do, and, sort of, talked this person off the edge and got them in the right place, and, from what I understand, things worked themselves out. Then, this person continued to go back to doing their job.

Mike:     Wow.

Brian:    Little things like that in our industry that… It’s a stressful place and people are doing their things, and every once in a while, you do something pretty amazing and you impact somebody’s life. So, that one always, kind of, resonates with me. I thought that was always, kind of, interesting.

For me, personally – I’ll tell you one other little one because it reminds you that technology impacts everything. I’ve got a phone call one day… Again, I was working in the tack and you’ve got these crazy phone calls. I got a phone call from a woman and she said, “I’m the principal at this elementary school…” and she was, literally, in tears. She said, “We just introduced the Internet to our school, everybody really loves it, the parents loved it. I had to do a lot of stuff to get funding for it.” She was just in tears and she said, “I don’t know what I did. I did something. It doesn’t work. I don’t know what to do. We didn’t buy the contract to get support and I’m just hoping that you guys, out of the goodness of your heart, will help me.”

So, you know, you feel bad and you want to help her. I asked her a few questions and I said, “Do you have a computer, like a laptop that somebody can plug in to the box and we can try to figure this out?” and she says, “I don’t.” I said, “Well, what about any of the kids at your school? Does anybody at your school have a laptop?” She sent the word out to her school, she found a parent, and the parent sent it in looked like a first grader. Me, and the principal, and the first grader sat there and typed some commands in to this laptop and got the thing working again. You realize how important technology was even at a little level. You know, their school didn’t have anymore.

Mike:     Yeah.

Brian:    And the only person who can, kind of, fix it was this little first grader who brought in his dad’s laptop to make it work.

Mike:     That’s cool.

Brian:    So, you know, little things like that are always, kind of, fun. You don’t hear about those stories very much anymore because everybody wants to be the next Twitter, but there are lots of cool, little stories like that out there.

Mike:     Yeah, that’s really cool. I think that’s the neat stuff about the day-to-day that make you feel good once in a while when you’re coming home from work. So, that’s awesome. That, definitely, makes my day today. Thanks for sharing.

Brian:    You bet.

Mike:    Okay. That leads to the person of our show that I call the “Flash memory” section. [music] These are short questions/short answers that are designed to provide a lot of value to the audience. So, are you ready for the Flash Memory section?

Brian:    Let’s do it.

Mike:     Alright. What part of your daily routine is most vital to your success, Brian?

Brian:    Probably the first ten/fifteen minutes of the day when I check through stuff like Twitter and some of the newsfeeds, and just try and figure out what happened in the last twenty-four hours.

Mike:     Awesome. What is your strength?

Brian:    I always say my strength is my ability to take complicated technical ideas and explain them to people in t-shirts or suits, and make sense to both those people.

Mike:     Awesome. What about a weakness?

Brian:    I am not great in big open rooms of people that I don’t know, so any big receptions and stuff, I’m like a fish out of water. I don’t know how to start conversations with strangers.

Mike:     I’m so with you on that. I’ve spent sixteen years in sales and marketing, that, to me, is my… I would say, I’m not a good schmoozer.

Brian:    Me neither.

Mike:     So, I’m with you there. I need some type of an introduction crutch. But, great. What single training has impacted your career success the most? What made it so good?

Brian:    I went to a negotiation… I got to go to a negotiation class one time. I think that one was the most interesting to me because it thought me that as long as you take a complicated scenario and you can try to create, sort of, a win-win for people even if the balance of it tends to be 70/30… If you can create what feels like a win-win for both sides of the table, in most cases, not only did you, sort of, solve the problem, but you’re going to get to keep doing things with those people going forward – you haven’t created any enemies.

Mike:     That’s neat. I think that’s a huge point. In fact, I’ve had a couple of discussions about that with our interns that we bring in for marketing. They’re talking about the classes they’re taking, and I always tell them one of the biggest things in business is that everybody has to walk away happy. Sometimes, you think it’s all about these big, heavy negotiations and crafty strategies, but, at the end of the day, it’s just people doing business with people. It has to be something where everybody is benefitting or walking away happy so you can continue to do business together. I would totally agree with that. I think, that’s an awesome point that sometimes gets missed in all the hype of business.

Okay. What is an online resource that you can’t live without?

Brian:    Right now it’s Twitter. It’s the place where I can get my day-to-day news, my day-to-day, sort of, interesting tactical insight. It’s a fun place if you’re watching sports or something on the weekends to, kind of, sometimes, experience some of the crazy stuff that will happen like a Hail Mary touchdown or something, just to watch the whole medium explode, like, really quickly is really interesting to me.

Mike:     Very coo. What telecom or cloud service provider have you had the best experience with?

Brian:    I’ll, sort of, pimp some of the things we use for the podcast. We use Dropbox religiously. We love that service. We use a podcast service called Buzzsprout, which is just a couple of guys who built this really simple to use application that distributes our podcast. We use Amazon Web Services for a few different things in terms of saving things, and backing stuff up, and experimenting with a lot of technologies.

I think, for us, any cloud provider or service provider that makes the experience really easy, we tend to love. Everything is complicated these days. The simpler you can make it… We worry less about price than we do about is it simple, because we’d like to think our time is valuable.

Mike:     Absolutely. If anybody’s listening, and they’re driving and they can’t write these stuff down, don’t worry. Take a look at our show notes when you get back to your office and all that stuff will be listed there.

Okay. The last question I have for you today, Brian, is: Tell us about something that you’re passionate about outside of work?

Brian:    You know, I wasn’t in to this so much early in life, but since I’ve moved to North Carolina (I’m originally from Michigan) some of my friends and neighbors have all gotten me really in to North Carolina barbecue to a point where me and a couple of the neighbors have started a side barbecue company. We do catering for events. It’s an awesome way to… It takes a long time to, sort of, get barbecue right, but that moment when a hundred people come up to you and go, “Man, this food is awesome. You just made our party,” that’s, kind of, become my new hobby and a new, sort of, passion outside of family and technology.

Mike:     That’s awesome. What’s the name of your side barbecue company?

Brian:    It’s called Oink. So, Oink – BBQ NC.

Mike:    That’s fantastic. Now, for those of us, like myself, who are not as familiar with barbecue, but obviously, you made it sound really good, what would you recommend as a starting point for anyone?

Brian:    Well, barbecue comes down to two things: It’s the meat, so people tend to either be, sort of, cow people, they like steak, and brisket, and stuff or they like pigs, they like pork and pulled pork. So, that’s always one thing – try both out and see which ones you like.

Barbecue comes down to sauces and stuff like that. There are a million different kinds of sauces that you can put on them from vinegar to, sort of, mustardy stuff, to ketchupy-based stuff, to lots of stuff. So, try them all out, see the couple that you like, and then once you find the area you like, you’ll find that it’s like wine or anything else of food – it gets really deep, and complex, and fun.

Mike:     I’ve got a question for you. When I’m barbecuing at home, I’ve been told to barbecue the meat to where it’s pretty much done first, and then start heaving on the barbecue sauce and flipping it a ton, and that’s, kind of, the way I’ve always done it. Am I doing it right or is that the wrong way to do it?

Brian:    Yeah, that’s usually the right way to do it. If you get the meat right, you know, you get the meat to the right temperature or the right amount of smokiness, or whatever you’re trying to do… Actually, in a lot of cases, you don’t need anything else. The barbecue sauces, the seasoning, and everything, kind of, can be an add-on later on, so, yeah, I think you’re doing it right and somebody gave you good advice.

Mike:     Good. So, it’s a little bit burnt on there? Is that the way to do it – just a little bit of burn on that sauce?

Brian:    It all depends on what you’re cooking. Some people, you know, if you’re making steaks, people worry about how pink the middle is. When we do barbecue, we worry about, kind of, like, smokiness, and flavor, and the kind of wood that makes the smoke, so it all depends on the kind that you’re cooking.

Mike:     Awesome. Well, those are some good takeaways for me, at least. I definitely know I’m not doing it completely wrong. I think, my father-in-law told me that, so I’ll have to go and make sure I tell him “good advice” – that’ll give me some brownie points too.

So, okay. Well, that’s all I had. What I’d like you to do now, Brian, is just take a minute and share with everyone how they can get a hold of you.

Brian:    Yeah, sure. If you’re a Twitter person, you can follow me @bgracely. If you’d like to listen to our podcast, it’s called The Cloudcast. You can find it at http://www.TheCloudCast.net on the web, or on iTunes, or Stitcher. If you’re interested in any of the stuff I do in my day job, if you look up – you probably can just Google my name or if you look up “Wikibon,” you can find all the research that we do about cloud computing, and the trends, and stuff in the industry.

Mike:     Awesome. Well, thanks. It’s been great talking to you, Brian. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Brian:    Yeah. It’s been fun and honored to be on the first couple of shows. I hope you guys do really, really well with podcasting. It’s a fun medium and great knowledge you guys are trying to dig in to.

Mike:    Thanks. We’re working hard at it.

Brian:    Good.

Mike:     Okay. So, that’s my conversation with Brian Gracely. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I thought there were some really cool stuff in there like his advice on a way to get praise by bringing others in to meetings and discussing the projects you guys have been working on – having them present some details on the project you’ve been working with them on. Obviously, they’re going to say some stuff about the good work you’ve been doing and get you some praise that way, so I thought that was a great tip.

I also thought the Cisco thing was really cool, just a neat, uplifting story about how that guy handled the call that came in the call center for the person who thought it was a suicide hotline. That was really neat. I also liked the fact that I got confirmation that I am applying barbecue sauce the proper way. A pro told me so, so I like that a lot.

Okay. One last quick reminder for our free giveaway. Again, it’s a list of the best questions you should ask yourself before shopping cloud VM providers for your company. It’s twenty-five or so awesome questions that will really help you find the best cloud VM providers upfront as opposed to down two or three quotes down the road.

To get the list of questions for free, all you have to do is text the word “CLOUDVM” to the number 44-222.

 

Related Content

Tagged with: