Introduction
This week I’m joined by Jerry McGlynn who has served as the CIO of Specialized and Interim CIO of Disney Studios.
We discuss the challenges facing companies today and the role of the CIO. Jerry shares his perspective on how companies are getting a hall pass right now and the value that presents. He digs into what is holding companies back and what actions they can take to better position themselves in the short and long term.
Speaker Profiles
Jerry McGlynn LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-mcglynn/
Specialized: https://www.specialized.com/
Disney Studios: https://www.waltdisneystudios.com
Audio File
Featured Hashtags
#CIO #Leadership #Innovation #DigitalTransformation #CIOitk
Podcast Transcript
Tim Crawford 0:02
The companies are looking for new ways to transform their business to remain relevant and differentiated within their industry. Technology now plays a central role in this transformation. Hello, and welcome to the CIO in the Know podcast, where I take a provocative but pragmatic look at the intersection of business and technology. I’m your host, Tim Crawford, a CIO and strategic advisor at Avola. This week, I’m joined by Jerry McGlynn, who has served as CIO for Specialized and Interim CIO of Disney Studios. We discuss the challenges facing companies today, and the role of the CIO. Jerry shares his perspective on how companies are getting a hall pass right now, and the value that presents. He digs into what is holding companies back and what actions they can take to better position themselves in the short and long term. Jerry McGlenn. Hey, welcome to the program.
Jerry McGlynn 1:01
Hey, Tim, thanks for having me.
Tim Crawford 1:02
This has been a long time coming. We’ve known each other for a number of years now, and I’m just really excited to have you on the program.
Jerry McGlynn 1:09
Oh, thank you. I’m excited to be here too. I’ve listened to several of your podcasts before, and it’s an honor to be included in the ranks of CIO in the know. Oh,
Tim Crawford 1:16
thank you so much. So, Jerry, just to give the audience a little bit of background. You’ve served as CIO for a number of companies, including Specialized, and you’ve also served as the interim CIO for Disney Studios. So, maybe take a few minutes and talk about who Jerry McGlynn is and your roles as CIO.
Jerry McGlynn 1:35
Sure. So, Tim, you know, I come from a lot of different industries and backgrounds along the way. Started my career in supply chain, but with Disney I got a big set of experiences on hospitality, retail, and media, and then later on, as I transitioned to other companies, started adding apparel and footwear, along with e-commerce and direct to consumer functionality into it. So been in a lot of places over the years, and as you mentioned, several iconic brands along the way. My role is typically I come into an organization where the company needs to update itself and they need technology to play a more significant role in the organization. That’s what I do. I help build up fantastic technical teams, I can help them figure out the technology, and then put a roadmap in place that allows it to scale in a global fashion that’s really consistent and predictable.
Tim Crawford 2:24
No, that’s awesome. And I’m looking to tap into some of that expertise that you and I have talked about over the years, but let’s kind of bring it to the present day for a minute. This pandemic that we’re all dealing with has really thrown business into a tailspin, and one of the outcomes of that is this work from home, but it’s also given CIOs and CISOs a moment of pause. What’s your take on work from home, and how the pandemic kind of plays into the role of the CIO?
Jerry McGlynn 2:52
I will tell you, it happened so quickly. If you look at it from this perspective, now you could see it coming, but a lot of people were caught off guard. I was spending a lot of time talking not just with CIOs and CSOs, but also CEOs and CFOs and COOs as well, and really, what it comes down to is if they were off the back on certain tasks and functions, they’re going to be really off the back now, and maybe a case in point would be having the endpoints properly secured, or having your laptop set up in such a way that you can quickly deploy a dozen laptops without taking 15 people’s worth of time to get it done, so definitely not having some of those fundamentals in place really puts people backwards a little bit at the beginning of this thing, and the sad part about that is right now it is all about being nimble and responsive to changes in the marketplace, and so you really can’t have yourself spending time on the blocking and tackling of it. Really, need to be focused more on delivering the solutions and the functions. So that’s a pretty big thing right now, but I do think with what’s going on, I think one thing that I’ve heard a lot from people has been security in general. It’s not just the role of the CISO, right. They have a secured organization. It takes a village to build that, and so it’s a combination of everybody getting involved. And so I think the advent of adding security into the DevOps space, it couldn’t have come at a better time, right. Having security woven into the function of what your app dev teams are doing, I think was a fantastic move, and allows the CISO now to not be looking after the developers, but focused on other parts of the business, and if that’s working right, that frees the CIO up to be working with the CEO, CFO, and COO to really chart some new courses for the business to get through this moment in time that we’re in.
Tim Crawford 4:37
Yeah, do you think work from home is helping or hurting that progress?
Jerry McGlynn 4:43
I’ve heard both. When I talk with individuals, though, I will say that the individual response is that the individual contributors love it. They will fully admit that they’re working more hours now than they were doing before. I mean, for the obvious reasons, they’re not commuting in, and it’s. Easy for them to just fire up a laptop and start working right from the breakfast table. From that standpoint, I think it’s been working okay. I think as you start to move up the ranks to the leadership team, I think if you had a leader who was already somewhat proactive in regards to remote working philosophies, I think they’re doing okay right now, but some of the leaders who were used to counting heads every morning when they come into the office, those folks are struggling a little bit because it’s hard to measure productivity in that type of an environment, because those mechanisms were never there before.
Tim Crawford 5:33
I hear of folks that have used kind of a command and control that traditional mindset in the past, and they’re really struggling right now from a leadership perspective, or I wouldn’t even say leadership, I guess I should say management perspective.
Jerry McGlynn 5:47
Yeah, I mean any place where there’s a moment where people have to come together to get something done, it’s a point of disruption in the business, and I’ve seen it happen from very small things, key decisions that get made, all the way up to entire product lines being put on hold for a period of time because they can’t quite get people pulled together.
Tim Crawford 6:04
One of the things that I’ve heard you talk about is how companies are getting a hall pass right now, and I’ve even talked about this as well. But I wanted to get your perspective on what you mean by that.
Jerry McGlynn 6:15
Yeah, the idea first started forming in my head. I read an article on CNBC back in April, and they were quoting the CEO of JP Morgan, Warren Buffett, and the two of them were kind of applauding all of these CEOs of these big Fortune 500 companies who were basically stating that they were not going to be providing guidance on earnings for the foreseeable future, and really the two of them were going back and stating, and even the CEO of JP even said, I’m going to try to quote him here, often put by posting guidance like that, it often puts the company in a position where the CEO is having to deliver against a set of numbers that are very short term in nature, one quarter to the next, and Buffett has been trying to push this idea of think of a company as more of a long term entity instead of a short term one, and so it’s this interesting dichotomy right now, short term and long term. By not saying I’m going to give out guidance, I can now think long term, but because of the pandemic, I’m having to operate in very short term factors right now in order to save the company. So it seems a little kind of crazy in the logic, but it has opened up an incredible level of experimentation across a lot of different companies these days to try new business models that they never would have dared go after before.
Tim Crawford 7:30
That’s an interesting point. And I also saw that quote when I think of that unique period that we’re in now, and I’ve talked about this myself, and I’d like to get your thoughts. We’re at a situation where companies have the lowest risk that they probably will ever see in their corporate lifetime, and what I mean by that is customers are willing to give people that hall pass or give companies that hall pass. Do you think that that comes into play here is is kind of watching the customer behavior, and because we’re all in this together, that makes a difference, as opposed to just impacting a certain industry or certain geopolitical area.
Jerry McGlynn 8:14
I think it’s that, I mean, I definitely think that there is a openness of spirit that people have right now to let things pass as long as they’re being done above boards and back to some level of fair play, but I think the other part of it too is you don’t really have the option of doing nothing at this point, other than to do nothing is really to admit that you’re going to go under at the end of the day, and so that’s where I think kind of this move to preserving the company, getting that preservation in place in order to allow yourself to build a new foundation on top of it is a lot of what you’re seeing right now,
Tim Crawford 8:48
and when you think about what’s holding back companies from making some of those changes, and I also want to bring in your perspective on the CIO role and where the CIO can fit into this, what is holding back companies?
Jerry McGlynn 9:02
Well, going back to a couple of other quotes that I found interesting over the last couple of months, here there’s one that’s been floating around right now, and again, I don’t know the source, but I’ve actually seen it quoted a couple times now stating that the world of e-commerce has seen 10 years of growth in three months.
Tim Crawford 9:18
Wow,
Jerry McGlynn 9:19
yeah, that’s an amazing number, when you see it that way, and you can argue, was it nine years or 10 years, but regardless, it’s a tremendous amount of growth, and I think what’s going on here is you see the world turned upside down, and at Disney we did a lot of big kind of corporate transformations, and we, and we recognize there were moments when the business was shaken up and disturbed to the point where anything that had been kind of rigid and entrenched was now loose, and you had just a limited period of time to affect change within the organization before things kind of got rigid again, and so what you see right now with e-commerce is, will it be temporary, will it be permanent? Well, I think the. Companies that are very much leading from the front are going to see that that’s going to be permanent for them, and these were the ones who were out ahead of it right now, and getting out there and moving it forward. I’ll tell you, before all this happened, I was, I sat in meetings at a number of different companies, and the arguments were always the same, right? We have this new opportunity for a digital business, but it’s not going to be enough to take over the existing business, and so, how do we let the two coexist without harming that guaranteed revenue stream we’re getting from the old business? Well, this moment in time has completely laid waste to whatever your old business was, so you have to step in, and that’s where I think the CEOs and CIOs who were much more, I don’t know if it’s aggressive or direct or just opportunistic, they stepped in and they filled a void and are finding new ways to serve their customers differently, and I think there’s examples of that all over the place today that you can look at.
Tim Crawford 10:56
Yeah, and you and I have both sat in countless meetings, I’m sure that you try and bring up an idea, you try and bring up something that might be a little provocative, but there is that fear of disruption, there’s the fear of cannibalism of your existing business, core business, but to your point, the pandemic has really kind of laid waste to all of those arguments in a large way.
Jerry McGlynn 11:22
Yeah, I mean, you can go back and say that some of these issues were kind of a third rail issue, but I think what we found in the last six months or so is that as CIOs and CEOs and everybody within these organizations, when they started kind of gingerly tapping that third rail, I think they all quickly found it wasn’t charged any longer if they had the ability to step in aggressively, they found that they could do it quickly and start to see business coming in in very substantial numbers. Back to that 10 years of growth in three months, I talked with a couple of ecom companies where they weren’t as underwater as they thought they were going to be after the first couple of months, because ecom just picked up so much of what got shuttered through the wholesale channel,
Tim Crawford 12:03
you know, the other thing that I’ve seen, kind of along these lines, is the companies that just saw their revenue streams dry up, and they had to get creative and find a new way to pivot in a moment’s notice, they have to pivot, and so a lot of that, almost the way you’d think of hurdles, right, that they kind of get stuck in front of you. You talk about change being that third rail issue. These hurdles are gone because it’s it’s out of that that necessity to survive at this point.
Jerry McGlynn 12:33
It’s funny you bring that one up, Tim. That what you just said reminds me of an article I read. This was an example of something that happened in France, where in the early days of the shutdown, the farmers markets were all closed, and so you had these farmers who were accumulating all this food, and there’s plenty of stories in the US of food that had to be destroyed, but these farmers in France, they realized they couldn’t go to the farmers markets, they did have a number of people that they were doing home deliveries to, and what they did was they very quickly pivoted and said they went to the homeowner and said, look, if you can get your neighbors together, we will come and we won’t charge you for delivery fees, but we will bring in our entire truck into your neighborhood and we’ll sell directly to your neighborhood, so they started taking these roving the idea of maybe this roving farmers market to directly to the people, there’s fantastic stories like that coming out. I’ve heard about some apparel companies down here in the Southern California area that are really kind of going back to the roots of selling out of the back of a truck on parking lots and things like that.
Tim Crawford 13:34
Wow, that is something, but if we go back in time, I mean, there’s a lot of creativity and innovation that came out of times of depression and despair.
Jerry McGlynn 13:45
Absolutely,
Tim Crawford 13:46
you know, when you think about those rigid systems, though, we’ve built a fortress as an IT leader, as a CIO, you’ve built this fortress, and unfortunately that’s great because it provides some stability, but it might not provide you with the flexibility you need. How do you start to kind of take that apart to create that flexibility that is desperately needed in a moment’s notice today?
Jerry McGlynn 14:09
Tim, it’s something where today is not the day you start that journey. I mean, hopefully, as most people have been replacing systems over the last few years, they’ve been thinking about kind of more open architectures and ways of being more nimble and flexible, and if not, they’re probably just figuring out manual workarounds to keep themselves going on a smaller scale, while the team has got to go in and make corrections. But middle of August is not the time to be, to be making a big business pivot, if you are at least from a system standpoint, if you hadn’t already started that.
Tim Crawford 14:37
Companies are taking these different approaches, right? You mentioned the story about the farmers in France. Others are taking more of a wait and see approach, kind of looking at cash preservation, or hey, we’ll get through this, and once we get through it, then things will just go back to normal, whatever normal is. My opinion is, I’m not even sure what normal will look like in the future, but Who is thrived? Giving right now, and why.
Jerry McGlynn 15:02
Well, again, I’d say that it was the companies who were able to think more on their feet. We had a line we used at Disney when we were talking about what projects we would greenlight and which ones we put on hold, and we would always gage them on the probability of revenue versus the possibility of revenue, and the focus was always to drive those items on the probability, and I think a little bit of what I’m hearing from CEOs and CFOs is that they’re very much keeping some of those decisions much closer to themselves than maybe they would have in the past, and very senior leaders are realizing that their budget is not really their budget anymore, right? It’s really, it’s the CEO and the CFO’s job to make those decisions, and they’re making them, I think, where you have really capable CEOs who have either really good instincts or really good history of work that they can kind of fall back to, of kind of knowing when to run which play under what situation. Those are the people that are surviving forward, but the longer this pandemic continues, I think the wait and see mode is going to choose to be somebody’s undoing.
Tim Crawford 16:03
Yeah, I agree with you. I think the wait and see mode is incredibly dangerous, at least if you’re trying something now, like I mentioned earlier. The risk is low, relatively speaking. The risk is low, so try it now, figure out what works, figure out what doesn’t work, as opposed to waiting. Let’s say you fast forward a year, 18 months, and then what? Then you start trying and experimenting, I think. Then it gets really risky.
Jerry McGlynn 16:29
Yeah. Well, and the other thing, too, is that by that point in time, the winners and the losers have already been decided, right? Your opportunity to gain market share is today, and as we get a year from now, those market share positions are going to solidify, and it’s going to be hard to pull that back after you’ve lost it or never got it in the first place.
Tim Crawford 16:46
And I think about the folks that are structured in a certain way, like I think of not asking you to necessarily comment on Disney, but I think about, like, the Disney framework, parks, for example, and studios, and the different products, and some of those are non-existent at the moment, and that’s that’s a hard business model to shift from, but maybe there are still opportunities. I’m, I’m more of an optimist that there’s got to be a way to, to turn that into some sort of opportunity.
Jerry McGlynn 17:17
I think there is. I’ve got all the faith in the world in Disney, knowing them as I do, I mean, they are running those experiments right now. I mean, you can see them on the studio side with what’s going on with Disney Plus. They are figuring out what a future digital distribution model for video is going to be, and I think from the standpoint of what’s going on at parks, they’re definitely going to be operating in a constrained mode until population cap restrictions are lifted and people can get closer together, but in that time they are going to figure out different ways to continue. Again, this is going to sound a little cliche, but to continue getting the Disney magic out to everybody who’s who’s wanting to experience
Tim Crawford 17:58
it, and I think we’d all stand in that line, and say yes, we want some of that Disney magic right about now.
Jerry McGlynn 18:05
Yeah, and I think they’re doing a fantastic job of bringing it where they can. I mean, again, I think Disney Plus, what you saw with Hamilton, and what you’re seeing, what you’re going to see in the next few weeks with Mulan, they’re figuring this thing out as they go, and they’re going to keep figuring out different ways of bringing them forward, I think from a technological standpoint they are going to evolve tremendously coming out of this as well, and I think you’re going to see a leaner, really focused company that is just going to be stronger than it was before,
Tim Crawford 18:31
and that’s probably an accurate statement, you could probably say about most companies coming out of this, is that they’ll be leaner and more efficient in some fashion, so you know, if you think about the ways that a CIO can be proactive and what actions that companies can take, or should consider, what comes kind of top of mind for you? What are some things that you’re kind of working on and thinking through as we think through the pandemic crisis, we think about the economic crisis, because let’s not kid ourselves, even if we had a vaccine today and people were inoculated from the virus, we still have to deal with the economic crisis on the heels of that. So, what are some of those things that you’re thinking through, or thinking about, or actions that companies should consider as they kind of go through this thought experiment.
Jerry McGlynn 19:23
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s been two things that with the companies I’ve been talking to, the guidance I’ve been giving them, and even trying to help them work through some problems. It’s speed and having good data in order to make great decisions, speed of making decisions, not boiling the ocean when it comes to deciding what we’re going to do and what we’re not going to do, be as nimble as possible, but then having good analysis and benchmarking to go with it. I read a blog article from Full Story recently that was talking about how to do great experimentation, and the analogy that kind of was coming to mind as I was looking. At it is, you need to understand where you’re starting, so that as you’re doing this testing and as you’re experimenting and analyzing them, you know what is working and what’s not working, and if you don’t know where you’re starting from, but you’re just jumping in and doing a whole bunch of work, it kind of looks maybe like a peewee soccer game, where you just have this just crowd of people, everybody’s trying to kick the ball, and you don’t really know who’s making the good plays and not, but knowing where you’re starting, and then being able to iterate quickly, and even if it’s as simple as starting with three to five key metrics that you can quickly gin up and start working from, and morph and evolve as you start to learn more about what’s going on about you, but start at a known point. Go quickly, measure and evolve as you go. You’re going to find that you’re going to start finding some successes after just a couple of iterations.
Tim Crawford 20:50
This sounds like the adage around experimentation and the importance of experimentation and iterating quickly, kind of the fail fast methodology. Is that what you’re talking about?
Jerry McGlynn 21:02
Yeah, absolutely, definitely. Experiment, fail fast, but have the have the good information available. And if you get through an experiment and you realize you didn’t have the information, go back and ask yourself, okay, what was missing? What could I have if I knew two other things that would have helped me make a better decision? What would those two other things be, and get them added into your repertoire, and do it again.
Tim Crawford 21:24
I love that. Okay, as we kind of wrap on the episode, I want you to look into your crystal ball. As IT leaders, of course, we all have crystal balls, right? But looking into your crystal ball, what’s your perspective on where we go from here? I mean, what, what does that look like? What does that future look like?
Jerry McGlynn 21:42
Well, I think Tim, you kind of said several things earlier that I think all kind of bake into that, right? If we had a vaccine today, you just think about just the supply chain effort that would go into getting a vaccination deployed to 350 million Americans, let alone five 6 billion people, and how are we going to deal with people who want it, who don’t want it? It is going to take months and months and months for the vaccination to get in place, and then ultimately take hold, and see the numbers come down, and then, as you said earlier, we’re still left with the economic issues that have been dropped on top of us, and so I would say that CIOs, CEOs, CFOs, and everybody above, I think we have to realize that we are going to be in a state of chaos for two years. There’s this churn is going to happen, we’re going to be in this mode, so that gets back to where I don’t think that let me just hunker down and stick my head in the sand for a little bit, and this will just be over in three months. That’s just not a strategy that’s going to work for somebody, and so we’re going to have to learn these lessons. We’re going to have to move fast. We’re going to have to continue to trial ourselves, look for things that will scale, and try to support the traditional businesses as we come back online with them.
Tim Crawford 22:59
Oh, that’s great, Jerry. Thanks so much for taking time to join the program today. It’s been great having you on and sharing your perspective.
Jerry McGlynn 23:08
Tim, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Tim Crawford 23:12
For more information on the CIO in the Know podcast, visit us online at CIO in the know.com You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Please subscribe, and thank you for listening. Thank.
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