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Participants:
Brian Regan; Host
Tony Colon, SVP Engineering and Product Incubation
Introduction:
Welcome to Innovation Matters, the podcast about technology innovation, why it matters, where it’s happening and how it’s changing our world. Each week we talk with industry leaders and experts about topics ranging from corporate innovation to digital transformation to artificial intelligence and beyond. Join us for a provocative conversation about the future of business technology and society.
Brian Regan:
Why does innovation matter? There are a limitless number of answers to that question with enlightening and fascinating stories behind each one. Welcome to Innovation Matters. I’m your host, Brian Regan and in this podcast, I sit down with innovation catalysts from all areas of business, technology and academia to get their perspectives and insights and guidance and occasionally cautionary tales.
One of the most pivotal technologies spurring digital transformation over the last 20 years has been cloud computing. Companies large and small across every industry have approached business planning as an exercise in innovation beginning with technology design that increasingly involves sophisticated cloud architectures. My guest today has been an innovation catalyst from the beginning of his own career 20 years ago, helping companies chisel and shape cloud strategies to drive digital transformation and business acceleration. Tony Colon is currently Cisco’s Senior Vice President of Customer Experience, Engineering and Product Incubation, overseeing a global team of 1,200 people responsible for the user experience, engineering, growth, innovation and go to market of Cisco’s $14 billion portfolio of CX products and services.
Prior to joining Cisco in early 2019, Tony was at Salesforce for 10 years, most recently as senior vice president of their Success Cloud and the customer success group. In my lively and very engaging discussion with Tony, he offered up his perspectives on a wide range of compelling and timely topics. We started big as in how do you effectively manage and encourage innovation across an internal organization as large as 1,200 people within a company the size and breadth of Cisco. Tony also has insights on the role, impact and dynamics of innovation labs as they exist within larger enterprises. He has deep experience helping companies set up labs and is passionate about their potential as a catalyst but also offers some cautionary advice.
We’re four months into a global pandemic that has upended businesses and forced re-examinations of how companies actually structure and manage operations and environments. So, I took the opportunity to ask Tony for his thoughts on the future of work and where Cisco is helping organizations to address that challenge head-on. Finally, Tony talked about where Cisco is most focused in responding to what customers are asking for with heightened urgency in the midst of these global disruptions and uncertainty, what he calls the self-driving network. And with that, let’s get to it. Tony Colon, welcome so much to Innovation Matters. It’s wonderful to have you here today.
Tony Colon:
Thank you so much, Brian. Happy to be here.
Brian Regan:
And Tony, since I know of you and certainly have spent considerable time over the years delving into it and understanding what Cisco does and the organization’s approach to innovation and given your role, let me start with a softball question. Why does innovation matter and to you, how do you build it into your own thinking?
Tony Colon:
It’s a great question. The term innovation obviously has a lot of different connotations as you know, Brian, and the way I would frame it is innovation really drives many different feelings and behaviors in people and humans. If you think of right now you’re looking at SpaceX and some of the innovation that’s happening around the world and you can even think about within business something that we used to sort of take for granted which is going into the office every day and how we’re working from home and how we all needed to immediately innovate on the fly, all of that could be done in the context of the term or the word innovation. I’ve been doing this for the last couple decades and innovation to me is always something that gets me up in the morning and keeps me excited because it’s always an opportunity. You can innovate in everything you do but innovation for innovation’s sake, just I think that’s the danger of innovation. If no one’s adopting your innovation, if no one’s using your innovation, it sort of stifles progress. So, it’s one of my favorite things to do but I strongly believe there needs to be discipline just like with anything in business.
Brian Regan:
That’s terrific and that leads perhaps to my next question because we all know of the singular pursuit of innovation, the lone entrepreneur in Silicon Valley or elsewhere who is innovating on a timetable and with certain inspiration and perspiration that’s totally inwardly focused. You run a an extremely large organization. And so, how does that influence how you build innovation into your point as a discipline and conversely, where might it go wrong when you’re innovating at that scale particularly within an organization like Cisco?
Tony Colon:
Yeah, it’s a great question on innovation within a company the size of Cisco. And there are innovation funds, there are innovation challenges. As you know, Cisco invented the internet. A lot of the technology today that is running this this conversation that we have is likely going through not just because I’m on the Cisco network but the internet traffic and internet routers. And so, I think that the one thing that I realized that since I’ve joined Cisco about a little over a year ago is that ensuring that innovation is not specifically done by one group, that it is not solely the cool innovator sitting in a back room thinking of the next big thing but really giving people the opportunity, the place and the space on how can they innovate what they’re working on a day-to-day basis. Just because your business might have a decade of maturity doesn’t mean there’s not an opportunity to innovate. So, I’ve been a big believer that innovation is not just a sole team’s responsibility. But folks should understand the discipline, the process and sort of this whole concept of seed harvest and growing innovation within every team and I think that tends to be a challenge in big companies is that there’s one team who innovates and sort of left to not innovate the existing business model and that’s where I think innovation ends up dying on the vine.
Brian Regan:
And to that point, when you do have such a large organization under your purview, to what extent are you giving team members permission and opportunity to expand their own innovation goals and objectives?
Tony Colon:
So, the one thing we’ve done is every year we put together our team plan and there are ideas that we have and that we know to run the business but most of what we’re focusing on in our plan is not how do I take my job that I do today and maybe innovate that. We always create these stretch goals and each one of these stretch goals has an embedded innovation inherently inside of it. So, this is something I learned back when I was at Salesforce is having a vision, linking that to values and then tying that to measures and metrics really helped keep the group grounded into what is it we’re trying to accomplish together. And we don’t even really tend to have the word innovation in a specific area of what we’re doing. It just happens to be part of our value system to say if you’re thinking of the problem in a creative way and you’re collaborating across teams, then the outcome will be better and that’s because you’re bringing in diverse thought, diverse opinion and it really ends up helping—my team’s a software development and product driven organization and if we don’t build products that people want, no one’s going to want to buy them and if we’re not creating value and the value is not what we think value is, the value is what the market and what our customers will tell us.
And I’ve quickly learned that just because there’s maybe a response from customers to say hey, we really like that feature, that’s great but when you show them two different things, so almost think of it like an A/B testing, customers will immediately react and give you feedback. But if you only give them one option, it’s hard to innovate when you’re only giving them one idea, one option and what we found very successfully is giving them that multi-flavored experience and then testing with a wide range of customers and I think companies like Cisco, large organizations, we tend to focus on our largest customers but what I found really valuable is not just the largest customers but the mid-market customers and small businesses, getting that not just the diversity around what we do as building product but diversity around the size of the business and how quickly they can move at the speed that traditionally enterprises are not the most agile or nimble but some small businesses can move very quickly and they’ve been really helping us drive our products.
Brian Regan:
That must be particularly relevant right now and I say that because up until four months ago the future of work was to many people a thought leadership, white paper or long-range planning. And it’s really become a strategic imperative that for every businesses demanding new innovative approaches as they look at how do we retool our organization for a completely different environment, a completely different way of doing business which I’m sure has great implications for what you’re doing in product development, software development at Cisco. So, what is your perspective on how Cisco is responding to what all businesses are retooling in the period we’re living through?
Tony Colon:
Well, it’s interesting because everyone had a vision for 2020. I remember I think my first time I sat down to put a 2020 plan together was probably in 2014 and it was kind of interesting because you think of 2020, it’s not only the year but also 20/20 vision. So, it gives you absolute clarity and everyone now would probably never have predicted that we’d be living in the time that we’re living in with this kind of disruption into our lives and our businesses. And so, all of the 2020 visions were probably much further along or being accelerated now in this new world. And I’ll tell you something, Brian, which is super interesting for us is we knew and we were already working on a plan to develop a lot of things we’re already building within Cisco today but they were a year and a half, two years away. Now we’re sitting down talking about how can we actually deliver this innovation or these products in the next six months because that is the pace that we’re now living in instead of sitting in a room with a bunch of executives and executive leadership team members at Cisco on a monthly basis or even on a half-yearly basis, we’re now sitting in rooms every week. So, the pace of conversation among executives and board members is no longer let’s meet up every quarter or let’s meet every six months. Now it’s to the point where we’re meeting almost weekly and defining and refining the overall business strategy and business plan because real life, we all realize that we have an opportunity during this crisis to really disrupt the world that we all knew we needed to do but now we’ve got a very—essentially every business has a majorly captive audience.
Brian Regan:
And pace and opportunity, you just talked about perhaps are influencing both how Cisco is responding as well as how your customers and other companies are responding and the need to really digitally mature much more quickly and that perhaps is giving more permission within an organization to allow the organization itself to be more fluid and nimble with how teams are more cross-functional to create more agile outcomes. But there are considerations and concerns that have to be applied when that kind of innovation is underway. How would you characterize that?
Tony Colon:
Well, I think for me I started my career in financial services and there’s always been a risk aversion within that sector to actually drive quote unquote innovation or be first movers. They’re typically not even fast followers. They’re typically laggards around adopting new technology. I remember how excited I was to get my first email address and most of my friends had already been sending emails very often and communicating to each other. And so—
Brian Regan:
Wait, are you saying that financial services is a laggard industry?
Tony Colon:
Well, I don’t know if it still is but I would say definitely the whole risk aversion really was created around the and for valid reason, right? They’re managing everyone’s money and very large amounts of cash and well, I don’t know if anyone uses cash but at least digital currency nowadays. And they’re also regulated industries, highly regulated for good reason. But when you really dig in and what’s been interesting and fascinating for me is you look at a very large bank, a traditional bank and then you look at a lot of the companies that have come up in the fintech world and you actually put them side by side and it’s not that one is skating past securities concerns or not adhering to all the regulatory requirements, it’s just that they have a different mindset. They have a different mentality and they don’t have a legacy of unwritten rules. And so, when I’m sat in these board meetings with executives at financial institutions, the first thing they say is how come these other companies can move faster and should we acquire a fintech startup? And I’m like no, you should embrace them but also challenge yourselves because the one thing holding you back is yourselves. It’s not the compliance or the regulatory concerns. It’s your unwritten rules that you can’t do this and you can’t do that.
And I will say a lot of companies are coming to Cisco to really understand how can they make this transition to cloud, how can they live in a hybrid world where a lot of your data needs to be within your own four walls but there’s certain parts of your business and your segment of customers that you can move to the cloud. But that’s really to me been fascinating, this just massive acceleration because businesses in the world of retail, in the world of travel and hospitality, who knows what those businesses are going to look like in the future? And for us, how does that become a much more digital experience that’s much more cost effective, that’s likely leveraging the cloud and economies of scale even more? And that’s the world at Cisco that we’re really starting to look at.
Brian Regan:
And so, that level of digital transformation is again obviously accelerating and you are by virtue of what you are providing customers at the table in a lot of the logistical structural technical discussions that lead to implementation. But do you find there’s a need or do you feel responsible for counseling on the accountability and governance side as you and by extension Cisco work with customers in helping them map what they’re going through on the transformation side?
Tony Colon:
Yeah. So, I think we as part of the creators of a lot of the tech that’s sitting within a company’s data center as well as the technology that’s sitting within a lot of these cloud providers, I do feel there’s a big responsibility for Cisco to help drive that transition. Prior to joining Cisco, I heard a lot of stories about people saying that the cloud was going to be the end of Cisco and what I think people forgot was that a lot of hardware needs to run and software needs to run those clouds. So, Cisco’s actually doing pretty well when it comes to this shift. And yes, you might see our traditional hardware change, our switching and routing business shift from maybe more companies buying it to more of these web companies or cloud-based companies purchasing from Cisco. At the same time, there’s a big push overall in the industry just to really start looking at what do I own versus what do I lease?
And for us, this whole shift into as a service, I always and I’m not the only one that uses this but it really feels more and more like the internet is becoming a utility just like you get any electricity, your light bill, anything that you receive in a meter model really is how the internet is starting to work. And you look at all the providers today for cloud. That’s exactly what they’re doing and they’re showing you essentially peak times at 9:00 am on a Monday morning as a business. Do you really want to you leverage the cloud for that because that’s peak times or do you want to use your own internal infrastructure? So, these are all things that we’re seeing as the evolution of the internet, the evolution of consumption and as businesses, it used to be IT was the lifeblood of the organization. Now it’s becoming how does IT become a provider of services to ensure that you almost never have to hear about IT anymore. You don’t have to worry about what’s going on behind the scenes.
Brian Regan:
That’s so true. And for those of us who have followed Cisco closely since the very beginning of John Chambers’ tenure, we’ve always marveled at the ability of the company to innovate at a level that people didn’t even really acknowledge. And yet Cisco moved from a company who grew through acquisition, sometimes acquiring companies that took a lot of integration to make the overall portfolio work but through it all, the organization positioned itself at least in my estimation as one of the great utilitarian innovators of the technology and the internet era. And I think what you’re talking about now is really speaking specifically about where Cisco continues to transition and pivot very smartly in directions that map and align to where organizations are going, to your point, who are evaluating, re-evaluating and continuing to structure data environments in order to better run their business.
Tony Colon:
Absolutely. And I think a lot of businesses are also questioning, let’s focus on what we’re good at. If you’re a pharmaceutical company, why not lease the internet or your IP from a third party and focus on enabling that your researchers and your staff have the best resources and access to the best technology to make them more successful? And you’re seeing this more and more with supply chain and companies who have large consumer goods. As this becomes more of the standard, companies like us at Cisco, we want to drive that transformation, we want to drive that shift and honestly, make it easier on companies because right now the shift to cloud is hard and at the time, it’s really due to the fact that we created a lot of applications within a company’s four walls. IT was the group that would build applications that had to meet the business requirements and now the shift to cloud, some of these applications don’t work in the cloud for many various reasons. And so, this whole questioning of do we lift and shift, do we have to refactor or should we just buy something off the shelf from a best of breed or niche provider? I think those are the kind of conversations that I’m seeing happen more and more of saying what is the business we want to be in as a company and do we really want to be in the business of data, do we want to be in the business of creating goods. And the conversation around being an infrastructure player that isn’t one of the large ones that are well-known out there is something that a lot of CIOs and this is no longer just the CIO conversation even. This is happening at the CEO level.
Brian Regan:
That’s right. Let me probe your thinking a little bit on something that I know from having read what you’ve written about is of particular interest and I think particularly through the prism of your career journey starting in financial services. You were at Salesforce. Now you’re at Cisco. Three distinctly different environments but you’ve written about innovation labs and we’ve all seen examples of enterprises large and small who believe that innovation labs have to be implemented in order to spur the larger enterprise faster, quicker, more agilely. But I’m interested to have you expound a little bit on that perspective you have about innovation labs and whether it is one-size-fits-all, whether there is a particular path that companies have to follow based on certain criteria?
Tony Colon:
Yeah. So, I love innovation labs to be honest with you. I love the principle, the concept and the idea of innovation labs. It’s funny because I actually spent a lot of time helping companies build innovation labs. And the irony of an innovation lab, it goes back to kind of when we were starting the conversation, Brian, which is having an innovation lab is almost table stakes when it comes to driving innovation or driving a transformation. Most companies have a briefing center where they bring customers to show their latest and greatest products or at Cisco, we’ve got an amazing sort of almost think of it as a museum of a lot of the products we’ve built over the last 35 years. And I’ve spent time with companies where they’ll build an innovation lab and they can just say yes, we’re innovative because look at our innovation lab. And innovation labs do not work if it’s just kind of the innovate to innovate or if it’s only for specific groups of people or one small team. What I found very successful in them—and I’m from the Midwest. I’ve seen it happen from very large agricultural companies that have just done an amazing job to insurance companies who also do an amazing job.
But it required a cultural shift and it required honestly, the CEO mandate and the whole concept of the innovation lab was to give people an embracing sort of this culture and then many organizations you might hear of things like citizen developer or shadow IT. Every time someone brings that up to me, I said you should embrace that. That means you have a culture of innovation that’s lacking sort of the ability to channel that excitement and that innovation in a place for good and if you call it shadow IT, it automatically feels like a bad thing. And so, having the whole idea around building an innovation lab I think is great. It should be a place where you actually host events, where you actually host different companies, maybe you host your ecosystem. Or I’ve seen some of these innovation labs fail is they get a ton of fanfare when they first launch and then you kind of walk past it and it almost becomes one of those things like a little feedback form on a website. You’re like oh, I didn’t even know that existed because it’s always just sitting there and no one’s ever there. No one ever uses it. And that to me is scary because there’s a lot of companies who still have these innovation labs. And it’s interesting. I haven’t thought this through completely, Brian, but now that we’re pretty much all working from home at least here in the U.S. and parts of Europe, what does that feel, what does that innovation lab look like and are we still innovating because we don’t have access to a lab anymore? And I would guess and I’m pretty confident in this guess we’re all innovating almost every hour of every day and where none of us are going into a lab to do it.
Brian Regan:
That’s a fascinating revelation. And also, what you talked about relative to the buy-in from the C-suite particularly the CEO is something that I hear all the time particularly from guests on this show which is it’s never going to work unless you have the consistent and persistent support and advocacy from that level. You talked about your own accelerated pace of work on behalf of customers and in R&D. Where do you think Cisco needs to be? And you talked about what we’re doing that was once on an 18 to 24 month plan is now accelerated to where we’re trying to deliver to customers in six months. But where do you—and this might be a little bit of a real prognostication question—but where do you see Cisco being in 18 to 24 months? Is there anything in particular that you feel will continue to differentiate what Cisco is doing based on what you’re doing now?
Tony Colon:
Yeah. I spend time with a lot of customers and you tend to triangulate information into what am I hearing in the industry, what am I hearing from customers and then what are we hearing internally from our own internal research and strategy. And for me, what I strongly believe and my team and I sit and talk through this and really sort of helps us set the vision for where we want to go and where we want to be is companies want the self-driving network. Just like we keep talking about the self-driving car, that’s becoming more and more of a reality. I’m sure, Brian, you and I thought at some point we’d be in flying cars and all the movies, that was the big thing. But that wasn’t really reality. The reality that I’m seeing is this concept of the self-driving car. It’s kind of interesting when you’re in a self-driving car. It’s also the most boring experience ever. The car goes the speed limit. It stops fully at every stop sign and it gets you from point A to point B not any faster, not any slower than what Google Maps or Waze tells you. Now that’s okay because you’re getting there safely. There’s predictability and there are many benefits to that experience. You can multitask and do things in the car with the car taking you to those places. You can work from your vehicle. That’s kind of the whole mentality behind it.
Now if you put that context in the network, how can a device be on standby, ready to come in and actually help if something goes down, if there’s a failure in the network? How can it attack a threat before it happens? All these things are technology that we already have at Cisco. But how does that all work in unison? We have such a resurgence or a such a surge of usage of video products using WebEx. That demand has picked up tremendously as has our VPN solution which a lot of companies were looking at VPN as sort of a technology that was in some cases archaic and now it has a huge resurgence around people working from home and securing applications and their laptops that connect to the network. I think all of that sort of tied together is being able to go back to that whole idea of I want at the click of a button to see how my operations are going, I want to be able to see how much cost is being consumed by the network, how much bandwidth I need.
And I think the other thing that I would say that Cisco will continue and maybe be ideally a pioneer in some of this space is imagine, Brian, you go start at a new company and instead of having to go to an office to get your welcome package and your laptop and everything else that comes with it, you literally get a package in the mail which is a self-installation kit that automatically connects you to your network to your company’s network, email’s already set up, your network, your video conferencing, everything all in one single solution, one single product at the click of a button. I mean that would be the ideal scenario for any CIO because one of the largest costs is the initial onboarding of an employee and then the exiting of an employee. And so, that to me, how can a company like Cisco drive that usability, easibility and the best employee experience? I think we always talk about customer experience but it’s not just the customers. The employee. A happy employee makes happy customers.
Brian Regan:
That is a brilliant outcome to envision, Tony, and I love the self-driving network. I love the analogy to the self-driving car. As a long-time marketing person, please trademark self-driving network and push that upstairs quickly because that is a fantastic way of describing where a company like Cisco wants to skate to before anybody else. Tony, with that, I literally could talk with you for hours more because I’m just fascinated by the journey you’ve been on, what you’re doing at Cisco, I love your take on innovation labs. I may, in fact, talk about your perspective on the myth of innovation labs as a silver bullet but we’ll see how everything comes out in the editing. But I want to thank you so much for spending some time today on Innovation Matters. Greatly appreciate your perspective, your insights and your time.
Tony Colon:
No. Thank you, Brian, and anytime, I’d be happy to join you back and this is awesome. So, thank you.
Brian Regan:
Terrific.
Tony Colon:
Alrighty. Thank you, Brian.
Conclusion:
Innovation Matters is a production of Actual Agency, helping businesses communicate in a changing world. More at www.Actual.Agency.
:
Welcome to Innovation Matters, the podcast about technology innovation, why it matters, where it’s happening and how it’s changing our world. Each week we talk with industry leaders and experts about topics ranging from corporate innovation to digital transformation to artificial intelligence and beyond. Join us for a provocative conversation about the future of business technology and society.
