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Hi there, I'm Ben Pearce and welcome to the Tech World Human Skills Podcast. Every episode we talk through how to thrive in the tech world, not just survive. Now, if you want me to work with your team, just give me a shout. I love to help teams be more influential, memorable and successful with their stakeholders. Head over to www.techworldhumanskills.com to book a chat.
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World Human Skills Podcast. Welcome along, it is brilliant to have you with us today. We're talking about the challenge of turning the things you've learned into things you actually do. So they're not just theory, but applied changes in behavior. Now, our guest today loves to learn. Not only that, he loves to put it into practice. He's Senior Director of Solutions Consulting at PagerDuty. So please welcome to the show, Tim Chinchen. Tim, it is wonderful to have you with us. It's great to be here, Ben, as well. So yeah, from my shed, really exciting stuff. From your shed on a boiling hot day. It is actually quite warm. Probably need to go get a shower. A fan at some point, call us down and then shower. Yeah, fan and shower is the order of the day. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We're gonna be talking about learning and how we're gonna apply it. But before we get into all the details,
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would you mind just explaining a little bit about your background for all of our lovely listeners? Absolutely, and thanks for the intro. And you're right about always learning. And I don't know, have I cracked putting it into practice? We'll see as we go through it. I think I'm doing a good job, but back to the always learning concept.
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If we'd cracked it all, then life would be dull. So we're always going through that. So I put a background on myself.
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30 years in technology for my sins. And I always split it up into, always look at it in two forms, even though we shouldn't say pre-sales and post-sales. But I spent 15 years delivering software, writing mapping systems of all things, working from all sorts of crazy notions, such as telling folks that in the 90s that there will be maps on mobile phones and people thinking that we were definitely drinking something. That became a reality through to running things. I worked with a large telco in the UK to help write mapping systems for rolling out their fibers to the premise. So a few thousand disgruntled engineers that we used to work off paper maps, converting them to digital systems. They have fun and games doing that sort of stuff. And then 15 years ago, took the move from post-sales to pre-sales, which was taking a lot of the tech. So, you know, at my heart, I love a bit of, I'm a Java and .NET developer, although I'm dabbling now with other technologies.
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But I wanted to take those skills and everything I'd learn and apply it to, I say to selling, but to helping people solve challenges and working with multiple customers around the globe.
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And 10 years ago, so I did a, worked with Dynatrace and CompuAir and AppDynamics in the kind of the operations IT space. 10 years ago at AtD, I also decided to take that move from being the correct phrases from an IC to a managerial position as well. So then you're leading folks, essentially. And I've done that for the last 10 years, being a manager, leader, that's a whole other topic of conversation, but I'm gonna go for a, hopefully, I'm gonna say hopefully, a leader in the pre-sales area. And as you said, eight years now at PagerDuty, I was spoiled, I was one of the first folks in Europe, effectively. So I was spoiled, some amazing customers that we were working with and continue to work with as well as we grown the company. Gah, when I joined, what were we? 80 million, it was all public, so I'm not showing anything, 80 million ARR to pretty much half a billion now today as well. So we've done some amazing growth of the company. So yeah, pleased to share some learnings and findings. Yeah, well, I mean, it's brilliant to have you with us. To talk about something that I think is really important because I think in tech, you kinda have to love learning because we have to do it all the time. And so the people working in the tech industry know that they're gonna have to constantly reinvent themselves because the tech is constantly reinventing itself. But the challenge is if you take the tech aside, which, you know, may last for a long time or it may not, depending on the tech, the other things as well,
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may well last for a long time. Let's say how you communicate, how you negotiate, how you give bad messages, things like that, right? They're gonna be the same pretty much regardless.
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So how do we learn all these things? There's all of these books coming out, there's all these courses, there's all these articles on LinkedIn.
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How do we take some of the really good things and then start to actually put them into practice so that they're not a lovely idea but something that are real that we do. So I guess, handing over to you, how do we do it? I will cover a couple of things as well. One thing I also wanted to interject as well, it's been a great week for me. And as I say, always is, hopefully everyone's having a good week in tech as well.
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And actually, before I jump into that, I went to a CIO event this week as well. So one of the large analyst firms stuck at these events. C-level, CIOs and CTOs. So who, and again, in the closed rooms, they all acknowledge there's an element of imposter syndrome there, because they're the pinnacle, but they have to be on top of all that tech and communicate up to boards as well. So they have to explain to their CEOs and CFOs who have no time for technology, apart from maybe they use chat GPT on their phone for about 50 seconds and now experts in the land of AI.
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So I will actually say, we'll talk about, for some of those folks, there is an element sometimes they discuss about imposter syndrome. And I'll even confess for myself, I felt like I was an imposter as a software vendor getting to know some of these C-level individuals, because I sell software at the end of the day, and they're our buying audience. So yeah, imposter syndrome with imposter syndrome was quite eye-opening.
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So I enjoyed doing that. But yeah, how do you take, and I suppose the element for me is, there are a lot of clever folks out there, and there's a lot of folks that we've only got a finite amount of time on this planet. So how do you take learnings that other people have made,
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dense that down very quickly and add things that definitely work into your style and the approach that you use, whether it's, as I say,
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if you're an individual contributor or someone in my profession in pre-sale selling software to someone, or even trying to explain to someone at a party what the heck you actually do for a living,
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all the way through to managing and leading people so that you give what's intended to be kind of clear and concise direction.
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I'll also share with you, it's classic, as you were going into a couple of the areas as well. That's a, yeah, I'm gonna cover my first one actually. That's quite a well-leafed book actually, I think we mentioned before, say, Four Disciplines of Execution.
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I think I mentioned earlier as well. I have a habit of definitely reading most of these, although I think, as I said, sometimes it's very tempting to read kind of the first half and say, "Gee, I think I've got most of this as well." And what I love about this, I'll tell you the first discipline and probably stick with that,
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is have one wildly important goal, and I can remember it because it's the WIG, W-I-G, one wildly important goal.
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And it was impressive this week, so I did ask a couple of folks on another team in the organisation, I said, "Can you outline your three priorities "and your three obstacles this week?
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"I've got a list of 10 priorities?"
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I've got a list of more than 10 obstacles. I think they were having a below the line moment, essentially. So I find it's very important, just one thing. Just each, if you're gonna have a strategy for a year, focus on one area, lots and lots of areas. So as leaders, we have a habit of running away and trying to solve everything at once.
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That particular, so I actually read that, that was three years ago, when a colleague actually, it was Ed at work, recommended that one, and he's like, "Tim, this is a good one for your, "what was then a new role, "I went from running European pre-sales "to running global pre-sales."
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And his advice, it's a much bigger estate you're looking after, and if you pepper everyone with too much, then any messaging you're trying to get across will be lost.
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So read that, take it in, and think about the one, wildly important goal. I love what I've done with that, and I can explain a bit more.
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So as we start, so I'm just starting to think about it. So what you've got is you've got a pile of books in your shed for anybody that's watching on YouTube, they could see this. That we take out on our commute, I have an hour's commute into London, which is actually where I do podcasts or read a book. And that's what we do. And so you've got this, so what you're gonna do is take a couple, maybe a lesson from each one as an example, and then perhaps we can dig into how did you now imply that. So from that first book, so what was that first book, sorry, that you really loved? Say it again. This one, here we go. Four disciplines of execution. Right, so four disciplines of execution. And the thing that you took away from that was one wildly important goal.
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Absolutely, one goal. Okay. And it's... So my question, my question,
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how, or shall we do this at the end, how did you put it into practice? Well, let's cover it.
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I'd love to cover how I put it into practice. Okay, should we do that now? Yep, let's do a, let's go through one and then how I put it in and how...
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So how I actually put it into practice. So through the year, I wanted to come up with just the one thing that I wanted my team to focus on. Okay.
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What we also have, I'm staring at my map here randomly because I'm thinking about where we did it. So I do get togethers with my team once a year in September.
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Whole idea is we have an event, it's three days. It's the pre-sales solution consulting, sales engineer, however you wanna call our team. It's our get together and our opportunity to learn about things. And I think at the start of the year, what's my one wildly important goal? That I'm gonna make sure that by the time our financial year starts in February, so that I can think about by the time I get there and based off a lot of the learnings in that. So in September, we're executing and doing the real kind of realization, as it were, for the vision. So I'll start peppering the ideas of this one important goal and then execute in September with the team. So they know running up to it, what we're gonna be doing and what we're talking about. And a big reason for that as well, it's amazing how many, and I speak to a number of leaders across the,
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across my industry, how they kind of, oh yeah, we'll have an S, we'll have a team get together. We'll talk about this and then we'll talk about that. And then some other things and some other things and people go home so confused, they won't really have a clear understanding of what the one takeaway is.
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And you find this from everything. When you do off-sites with folks, the wrap-up, lots of leaders will do the wrap-up. What was your takeaway, everyone? And those utter silences, they were thinking, oh God, we've done a lot this week, haven't we? I like the idea of everyone turning around and actually saying, Tim, you wanted us to learn about X and we learned X. So the first year I did it, I was kind of putting it into practice and I wanted to improve demos. So it was basically making sure that the team were taking all our products and doing the right demos and those sorts of things. We actually ended up doing a kind of a demo off,
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a kind of demo competition. Everyone had to demo to their peers or demonstrate our software to each other, which is always challenging because your peers are going to be a worst audience. (Laughs) I take an audience of a thousand strangers any day over a couple of colleagues that I work with judging my capabilities. So it was the first year, the second, last year was my definite one. So again, working in technology, we want to embed our solution in our client's architecture. Not for it to be a nice little thing on the side that's a useful tool for one of a different, better description. We have a platform. We want to embed it into kind of top of mind for the way that folks run their operations
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because we do, we offer our capabilities called the Operations Cloud and 15,000 customers and all this sort of great stuff, but we want it to be the core of folks operations and it is so my one wildly important goal was one word, architecture.
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And every time anyone was like, so what does Tim want from Tech versus everyone's architecture? So that's 40 techies of knowing exactly what my goal was by the end of it.
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I did, I don't mind admitting, I got slightly derailed by my CEO who came in and said, yeah, that is great, but folks, I also need you to think about a gen tick. So it's like, okay, architecture and we'll let you have a gen tick. So I ended up with nearly two wildly important goals out the back of it.
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And this year I have a plan for my next one as well, which might take us onto another book idea.
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Okay. Okay, and so how did you bring that love? So you've read this book, how did you select which bit was going to be really valuable that you wanted to take out of that book? And then how did you actually put it into practice? Did anything go wrong as you were trying to do it?
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Oh, did anything go wrong? That's always a good question, isn't it?
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I think in terms, it's measuring success. So I think it's each time that you do a goal, actually it's not one of the books I was gonna mention, but I will mention it anyway, because it's very good. You'll measure what matters. Think about your OKRs and the metrics that you're going to use to judge success at OKRs if you haven't come across it, objectives and key results.
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So probably the first time that I was implementing a wildly important goal, I didn't think about how I was gonna measure the thing. I just, everyone get better at doing demos.
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It's the second time around we looked at, which in fact, the way we did it, God, it's quite detailed,
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I made it sure it was clear to the folks on my team, this is what we're gonna do this year. We had a Tiger team actually got together to kind of put together what is our ideal state architecture? Because what we learned when we started to unpack this is every single member of my team was doing it all completely differently. So 40 folks in the team, which meant if I said, can I have an architecture diagram from you all? They were all kind of, some of them would be variations on an old diagram, but they would all be very different. So we had a team put things together. And again, it was very visible that by the time we had folks starting to practice and use the collateral that we were putting together. So by the time we got to September, like folks were already aware of what they were doing, but they were kind of white boarding. So they were doing whiteboard practice in front of peers. They were talking about our technologies and capabilities in front of each other. They're exchanging war stories. So one would use one client's architecture and compare it to another. We talk about which capabilities are being used and not used. So it was great to sit back and say, yeah, the team, we came up with an idea. The team without me have come up with their best practice and they're kind of rolling out amongst their peers and getting ready. And the other reason for architecture is where does AI fit into everything? So as part of our, because we're very much operational software, gene learning, GenAI, agentic AI, AI agents, all feature in that architecture as well. Yeah, it's great to see everything unfold and people take your one idea and make it 10 times better than you could have done. That's the bit I love about working with folks, folks on our team.
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Let's move on to the next book. Could you give us another example of a book you've read, something that you've taken from it and then put into practice? So at the start of the year, I'm like, okay, so I did architecture last year and what for our company will help move the needle forward? So everyone who works in any company has always got to think about how can we elevate to the next step? Because it's never, back to your point earlier, we're always learning.
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So I stumbled, it was airport lounge, stumbled upon the top 10s, what looks pretty good. Oh, that looks pretty good. So I'll go for that and see what that's all around. So story sell by a gentleman, Matthew Dix. This is another cracker, well worth reading.
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And at the time, folks were actually talking about in our organization, about how do we, we're very good as techies around articulating, oh, there's this widget and you press that button and some great things happen.
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I'll use an example from our software. So I have folks that will go in and they'd say, here's an amazing button and an amazing screen and it tells you about all the things that have broken before so that you can save time when things break again in the same way. We call it past incidents. And my feedback was like, yeah, it's great that you're explaining the widget, but what about telling a story about how a customer has used that before? So for example, there's a large car manufacturer, Swedish car manufacturer that has actually used that. And one of their approaches is that by knowing how often this thing happens, they can actually use it to drive down technical debt, which means they focus on making sure that doesn't happen again. And that means they improve developer productivity and they get things out to market quicker and they make more money and everyone's happy.
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That's probably not the best story actually, but it's starting to think less and techies do that. We think about features and buttons and widgets and everything else, but we don't always think about the outcome. So my mission with StoryCell is to start thinking about the outcome. How do we get a technical audience to start thinking about how we articulate value, how we keep people engaged? So yeah, Ben, you and I have been chatting for a little while now and you've got to think, I might have to ask you afterwards, were you engaged?
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You're listening to what we were saying. So if you have a techie that's just warbling through this button to that button to that button, and especially in this sometimes horrible virtual world, I do like seeing people face to face, but in the virtual world, you can lose an audience very quickly if you're not engaging. So my one wildly important goal for this year's get together in September when we do it is gonna be around story selling or using stories to articulate what we do. And I'm gonna take a lot out of that and also a lot from other people's experiences as well, because I've got some brilliant storytellers on our team. I wanna spread that across all the folks that I work with. And Matt's got some, in the book, has actually got some great examples for actually developing some of this. I love the fact that he talks,
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he talks about injecting humor into things as well. Did I tell a joke at the start of this? I don't think I did tell a joke, which was really bad.
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(Laughing)
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I'm gonna go on some tangents, Ben. I shared with some folks earlier this week that I use humor a lot as my offense and defense sometimes.
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So I do like to inject humor into things as well. It helps an awful lot. And I'll also mention, because I saw Arnie, so I went to a conference end of last year, and Arnie Schwarzenegger was actually speaking on the day of the election. He actually came over to, again, a well-known analyst firm. They're gathering in Barcelona, and he was talking through quite a few things, and he was actually talking about storytelling and selling, and one of his ones was as well, "Open up everything with a joke."
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And the one that he started with was, "I am very well known for the phrase, I'll be back." But now, unfortunately, it's more ouch my back. And it had the audience all chuckling away, and in Arnie's beautiful way of speaking as well.
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Sorry, complete tangent there. But what I love is that element of humor bringing it together to elements of telling story. I mean, Matt talks about a thing called homework for life, whereby instead of doom scrolling, his thing is just put aside three minutes of a day. So don't stop doom scrolling. Get a little spreadsheet. Write some of your experiences down. Write three things that were slightly more interesting, slightly different than the norm did you experience that day, or maybe go up to six when you start to get better at it. And over time, you'll bring up this amazing library of all your experiences that you can then pull upon in order to get some amazing stories out of things. Things where you, it's all about real life. So where you can get a really nice anecdote, where you made a mistake. So most of my advice is where I, I won't use the right term, I won't use that phrase because it doesn't translate all the way around. But when you do make a mistake, or you muck up, muck up's a better way of saying it.
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Because it makes it very relatable to other folks when you're talking about the stories that you go through. Yeah, and it's really interesting because I think about this sort of topic quite a lot. And from a neuroscience perspective, when you start telling a story, it lights up a different part of the brain to just the logical and just the rational. And if you can get the logical and the rational and the emotion going at the same time, it lights up more of the brain, which effectively makes it more, well, it makes it more effective. So actually, if you're in a state, so your audience is in a state where they're emotionally engaged and logically and rationally engaged, they're able to think better, they're able to recall things better, they're able to problem solve better. So by engaging them in that way, it makes a massive difference for the audience. So it's fascinating how neuroscience is backing up, something that we all kind of know, we enjoy a story down the pub or whatever, but actually neuroscience brings that to life a little bit. It's the dopamine and endorphins and all that. It's been known to release those things when you're being told a story that you can actually engage in as well. So yeah, I absolutely agree.
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Again, from this idea of bringing it, taking it from theory into reality,
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how are you doing that? It'll be interesting to see how much my folks follow on LinkedIn as well. So I thought that was really good, what Matt said. And then I thought, so how can I put that into practice?
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So we're gonna do a lot of storytelling in September when we come together. So we're gonna talk about, and again,
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it will be alongside all the other exciting things we're doing at PagerDuty, which is some amazing capabilities, you know, pitch now, some amazing capabilities alongside all the AI investments that we've made and all that sort of stuff to really help people's lives in operation so much better. So yeah, we'll be combining the storytelling with that.
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What I've done is this is my treasure hunt on LinkedIn. So I don't mind admitting, and we'll see if anyone watches this from my team.
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We're gonna do a treasure hunt in September. So every day since I thought, do you know what? I'm gonna do storytelling. I've been posting an anonymized story around a customer.
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And again, it's all anonymized and there are references as well, but around some of the outcomes that they had, some of the things that they found and using our software,
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as I said, and then talk about some of the savings and the metrics or whether that's responding to things quicker or getting people to acknowledge and take ownership of issues quicker or just reducing the amount of things that go wrong and go put in an organization. So I've been posting them every day. I'm up to about 30 or I think 34 I hit the other day. So the whole idea is they go out anonymously.
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And then one of my exercises to kick off in September, be great, because now people can go and have a look if they want to. I want people to identify who am I talking about on each one of these. So I'm giving enough information you might be able to guess. Because what I wanna do is have my team then obviously say, oh yeah, I recognize that particular customer, that reference study and then embed the story in themselves.
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It's interesting, as you're talking to be there, the first thing that we've sort of talked about about putting this stuff into practice is about your one goal. So there's something about focus there about putting it into practice. Second thing is you put a tremendous amount of effort into this. So you've committed to your thing. And then actually you put a lot of effort in, whether it be the homework that you talked about from the book, from Matt Dick's book, or whether it's you on LinkedIn putting these stories. So it's some focus on your thing and then putting some time and energy into that thing. You are right, you've got to commit to this stuff. And sometimes, you know, I don't mind admitting, I think probably about 10, 15 years ago, you come up with some really good ideas and a few days later, it's like, I can't bother with that. So you've really got to see it through.
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Which is actually why I quite like doing this podcast with you, Bennett, because I can't go away. I can't go away from that now. So you can keep me accountable in September. How did it actually go, Tim? So I can't get to August and say, yeah, you know what? I ran out of steam, I couldn't be bothered and didn't do it. So no, yeah, by admitting it to you, I've got to stick with it and stay with it. And again, part of the thing is, across my team, I've got some amazing storytellers that again, an amazing background in tech.
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Most of them, you know, global travels and they can tell you stories about cultures all around the world and that sort of stuff as well. So I'm looking forward to in September sharing each one of our backgrounds and then working with some folks that are at the start of their career as well. Yeah. Kids, yeah. Third book, let's keep moving on. We're running out of time, Tim. What was the third book?
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Oh, we could do, actually I've got a couple there. Let's do Surrounded by Idiots. There we go. Okay, okay. I won't take that as an insult. It was purposely bought, so I didn't buy this. This was bought by my kids because again, we were going on holiday. If we were on holiday, no, we were traveling into London and they went past the WH Smiths in a railway station. They thought, "Oh, that would be great for Dad." I'm positive, I'm sure. I've never said anything along those lines, but they decided to get that for me as a bit of a Father's Day joke.
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But again, a great book. I think we've all done these sorts of things and it's really good to look at the personality tests and understand your personality and how you communicate with others as well. So I think anyone that has got a technical background,
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and especially if you're doing the role that I do and you do as well, Ben, which is the taking complex technical things and making it consumable by others and communicating and meeting people where they are. So whether they're a technical person that wants to know bits and bytes and nuts and bolts and what it was written in and how many lines of codes in it and all that sort of stuff through to a CEO who's got no patience whatsoever, just wants to know how much is it gonna cost and how much will it save me once I've bought it? Or how much revenue will it create? Or will it not get me sued?
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I shall go on to selling tangent, risk, cost and revenue. That's the three reasons people buy stuff. Make money, save money and don't get your ass sued effectively.
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So yeah, that's a great one at understanding. Little bit more about yourself, a little bit of self introspection and understanding your style and approach and then understanding how to change that and cater that for folks that you're conversing with. So it's a cracking learn for both life in general,
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but also in work. You know, I don't mind admitting. I think I, what is it someone said? I'm an extroverted introvert.
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Someone said once to me, I can't remember who it was, but what do you like to do on a Friday night? So if you've had a tough week at work, what is your goal? Do you want to just go out and party and really kind of relax and chill out? Or do you just kind of want to curl up in front of the telly? I'm a little bit sometimes the latter. If it's been a tough one, it's the latter. And I found out from my wife, she's like, why would you want to do that? I'd want to go out with my friends and enjoy things. And I think I'm quite an outgoing individual as well. So that's why I love the term extroverted introvert, because it highlights. So I think obviously it's techies we like to sometimes hide away. I'd also like to share information as well. And so from that book, so I completely agree with you and throughout my career, I've been fortunate enough to do a variety of those different models. You know, so like there's the really famous one is like Myers Briggs of course. Myers Briggs, yeah. My favorite one I ever did and that I still use the most is Discovery Insights. I don't know if you've ever done that one where people are a color wheel, red, green, blue, yellow. Effectively what that one is, that's that sort of thing. Okay, so that one was brilliant. There's the Enneagram I've seen. There's Strengths Finder, I remember doing that one once. There's Saboteurs. There's all of these different ones that all shine the light on it in a slightly different angle. And you can all learn, you know, something slightly different from all of them. But I just love that idea of, hold on, if I understand myself and I'm a bit self-aware, actually then I can now think about how I effectively communicate with these people that are very different in their personality to me. Yeah, well it always boils down. And actually when we do hiring, I think it's very important that I say in my area of work to think about hiring people with pretty good EQs. So obviously you got your techies, and techies are great for coding in the background, but you do need, if you're selling technology and talking about it, it helps to have that EQ.
[00:33:21:21 - 00:33:24:13]
Especially if, as I mentioned, I spend a lot of time
[00:33:25:16 - 00:34:00:05]
out and about, as I said, CIOs this week, prior week actually it was in an AWS conference. So actually it was more down into the technology and nuts and bolts of how things work. So you do have to change the way you talk and communicate, and you do need to adapt, and I think you do have to have an element of EQ to think about that. Or we can go off on a complete tangent and say, can EQ something you can develop over time, or is it something that you naturally have? So, no, fascinating conversation.
[00:34:01:05 - 00:34:41:02]
So the question I'm gonna ask you then is, so you've learned about this idea of, I'm gonna learn about myself, understand people have different styles, and I now need to be able to adapt to those different styles from that book Surrounded by Idiots. How then did you put that into practice and take that from theory into reality? Oh, that's a good question. Hey, think about, how deep can I get into it? It's, the classic one is always one-to-ones. As a manager, we're all, hopefully only one that's listening to this, that has a managerial role, will always, will have regular one-to-ones.
[00:34:42:03 - 00:36:27:00]
There's not, I'm sure we've all worked in companies where you could go weeks without speaking to your boss properly, because they don't connect, but I do believe on regular, frequent one-to-ones and feedback and all those sorts of things. So a good one on that, and actually I like the, on a tangent, I use the challenger sale to understand the, the counter executives that I work with as well. But I applied that on our one-to-ones to think about the individuals that I work with, and whether I should change my communication style on the one-to-ones. Am I being, does an individual actually want to be more challenged on our one-to-ones, as opposed to a tea and cake style one-to-one of the nice, how's it going? They want, you know, I want, I want to see each week, I want to get better and better. So I need you to challenge me, Tim. So thinking about those individuals, or are there individuals where actually I might have been a bit too challenging on and I need to rein things back and make sure that one-to-ones are safe space for them to then talk about some of the challenges and stuff. So again, applying that, and I don't mean to say I use surrounded by idiots for one-to-ones, because that really is sending wrong message, isn't it? But as I say, use that technique. And again, like working with customers and clients all the time, so we need to make sure we're using the right communication strategies with folks and individuals, because at the end of the day, people buy from people. So, I mean, how many, it'll be interesting to know, I do know one company where they said they couldn't stand the sales rep that they worked with, but honestly, how many organizations buy from a company where they can't stand the individuals at that company? They all buy and you want to partner with clients.
[00:36:28:02 - 00:36:28:23]
So, yeah.
[00:36:30:02 - 00:37:52:08]
And so I'm sort of thinking about what you've said there, again, with a light of the how to get better at putting stuff into practice, and what you're talking about there is actually putting it into practice. Just practice, that's what I'm saying. You've literally said, "Right, I'm gonna commit to this. I've learnt the theory, I've learnt a little bit about this. Now I'm gonna apply it into my one-to-ones and think about how in each of these meetings, and you would have had loads of week, I'm sure, how can I actually..." And I guess probably some things you got a bit wrong and course corrected and learnt for the next one-to-one, something like that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's so much that we learn, as I say, that you learn, you utilize a little, I suppose the way I think about things is obviously, because yeah, you can't read a... Let's go into this. You can't read a book in a day. So I have it as my commute in my rucksack, normally going into town. So it's something that you'd have with you for a couple of weeks anyway. So it will be a top of mind reminder as you're reading it to then go and put it into practice. So I suppose one of my advice is definitely buy the books that you can apply as you're reading it in the place where you're working or in a scenario that you want to apply, because it might not just be work, it could be home life. Although I will say, my wife is very good at saying, "Don't use your work nonsense on me at home sometimes."
[00:37:53:15 - 00:38:22:03]
So when you use the phrase, there are certain phrases now that even trigger with me. So if someone says the, there we go, bit of fun. And so I said, "What I think I'm hearing from you is..." So if I say that tomorrow, she'll kill me. Because she's saying, "I know that's what you lot "all do in your work." It's your management spiel. What's the other one that I've started to... I started trying at home and then she caught me up on it, which is the...
[00:38:24:13 - 00:39:08:08]
Oh, I had a term for it, but it's the one, two, three. Let's talk about three things, sort of technique, that you'll see a lot of good managers and leaders apply very well. I call it the Alpha 123. Okay. I don't know if that's the official term, but it's a, sorry, Ben, complete tangent. But I've noticed quite a few folks, and I use it as a strategy as well, because you can hold the conversation with it. So Ben, if I tell you, "Well, I've got three things "that I'm gonna tell you about," Ben, you'll be sat there thinking, "Okay, so now I've got to wait "for him to do the three things." If I use that with my wife, she goes insane at me. So sorry, complete tangent. But again, all these practices and tips and tricks, we pick up these things weekly from each other.
[00:39:09:17 - 00:39:51:07]
And yeah, you can never stop learning, can you? Yeah. Well, mate, I've just glanced at the clock, and we are rapidly running out of time. Hang on. Should we summarize and maybe think about key takeaways? So from your perspective, what would be the key takeaways that you'd let people listening to this to take away with them? Yeah, absolutely. Stick it in your, if you're a commuter like me, and you want to start to grow and develop, pick one of these, stick it in your rucksack. Look on LinkedIn, there's quite a few folks doing some good recommendations of latest reads, but stick it in your rucksack and see if you can apply it to your day to day and the work you're doing. So whether it's stories, sales surrounded by idiots,
[00:39:52:20 - 00:40:28:02]
or our four disciplines of execution, give it a go and see what happens. And then I suppose my ask and my genuine ask, feel free to link into me. LinkedIn.comets.com. I was lucky enough to have an interesting surname. It's Old Dorset, by the way. Really? So folks can find out. My ask is if there's anything that you think I should read. There's someone that works in technology, works in pre-sales, works with a lot of AI stuff now. I'm always fascinated now what my next learning should be. So yeah, drop us some book recommendations.
[00:40:29:09 - 00:40:48:22]
Fascinated. And from my perspective, I think what, as well as the specific things from each of the books, which are just really interesting, what I really liked is, you know, we talked about the focus at the beginning, right? So you've got to focus, pick your one wildly important goal. You've got to put a load of effort in. And that sort of came through with what you're doing on LinkedIn and your storytelling.
[00:40:50:10 - 00:41:09:06]
And then you've got to practise it, you know? And you talked about that through your one-to-ones, you know, with the surrounded by idiots, how you've got to actually put time in and practise it, get it wrong, try it again. So something about focus, effort and commitment, and practising. Commitment is the big one. You've got to commit to it. Yeah, yeah, fascinating.
[00:41:10:12 - 00:41:42:21]
Well, Tim, final thing for me to say. Well, no, before that, so if people want to connect with you, I'll pop in the show notes, your LinkedIn. Yeah. So that people can find you. Pretty easy to find in LinkedIn. So then the final, final thing that I just want to say is, Tim, it has been an absolute pleasure to go through some of the books that you found inspiring and also some lessons on how we can take those learnings and start to put them into practise. It's been really interesting. So thank you so much for taking the time to come and speak to us. That's my pleasure, Ben. Thank you very much and see
[00:41:44:21 - 00:42:05:00]
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