S2 E3 (Part 1): FORTUNE FAVOURS THE BRAVE…AND THE STEADFAST: Transcript
Listen to the podcast about the meaning of life and the thought process from minutes 1 to 7.
(Niall) I was thinking about the trajectory of what way I wanted my life to go because you can be a busy fool, or you can be completely obsessed, or you can do nothing at all. And I just thought you’re got to be on planet earth for productively in a way you’ll enjoy it for about 80, 85 years.
So while I’m here, what am I going to do?
I was spending a lot of time thinking at the time, what’s it all about? Because if you make a lot of money. And then what, or if you don’t make a lot of money, because I had one uncle who I was very close to and he made a huge amount of money but was miserable. And then another uncle who had, who was utterly useless of making money and just train wreck when it came to his personal arrangements. But I guess he was actually a pretty happy guy.
But I knew I couldn’t live the way he does, which is absolutely no thought for tomorrow. I spent a lot of time thinking, look, if you’ve got gifts, whatever you’re good at — you should try and be your best at it and do some good with it. That was the conclusion I came to.
I did this analysis of finding your true North and, I came back to that a couple of times in my career because finding purpose means you can find your centre, means you can actually be comfortable with who you are because I was observant of enough a lot of people who were running around trying to prove to other people that they were successful or that what they were doing is important.
I could never figure out what was the point of that because people were burning so much energy. I got a bigger car, or I got a bigger house, I got a boyfriend and a girlfriend, all kinds of stuff. What’s going on. And it was probably particularly during the Celtic Tiger boom and everything else that I saw lots of that going on.
So, I came to a rather kind of modest conclusion, which is: I can actually think pretty well. And I’m pretty sure the reason I got into smoking was I was never good looking enough to attract girls, but I could chat to them over a cigarette outside in the smoking area. So why not?
And that’s the kind of thought process of fine, see the problem, you can either live with the problem or do something about it. So I began this lifelong passion of understanding cause and effect and asking questions like the five why’s test and things like that. And gradually, it becomes almost habit-forming.
In a work context, if somebody asks you for something, you have a choice in the moment of action and your reaction; you own that space in between. And most people don’t do anything with it. They just go from action to reaction almost instinctively in the way that if I drive to work in the morning, when I used to drive to work in the morning, I most of the time left my house and the next thing I knew, I was outside my office because my brain had just filtered out everything that happened in between unless something crazy happened.
In a work context or in the context of all the things that are important I made a conscious effort over time to spend time thinking about what I was doing.
So if we were, in the sales process, and you and I talked about this, Geraldine, a couple of times, put yourself in the mind of the buyer and really put yourself in the mind of the buyer. You begin to see things that you’d never have seen otherwise. They’ve got a career risk on this decision- how do we make that better for them?
It’s not just a… life isn’t a formula it’s made up of a lot of different things. Taking time out, I do the ironing in my house because ironing is the most robotic job in the world. And it’s the most phenomenal time to actually go completely into robot mode and the cycles your brain 85% of them are processing. Those are the things, and you get productive stuff done. It’s brilliant.
And fishing for me was the same thing. It’s something that requires almost no intellectual input. And it frees up your mind to actually allow you even unconsciously think about things. Some of the best ideas I’ve ever had have come about by saying I must really thinking about that and then switching off and doing something else completely different. Because your brain is still like most of your brain, you’re not consciously aware of it, it’s still turning away and amazingly enough, three, four hours, or a few days later, you’ll see an angle on something you hadn’t seen before.
So purposefully taking time, whether you’re plotting the destruction of your enemies or the promotion of your friends, or, trying to find a business case or trying to raise money or whatever else, it’s having the discipline to really think about it.
Now, there’s a certain class of problems that I am good at solving. And then there’s another class of problems, which I just wish I saw the patterns differently. It’s evolutionary that people look to see patterns. The grass is waving in the Savannah is natural. So you don’t pay too much attention. If the grass starts waving a different way, it probably means there’s a lion in the grass. That’s why your brain picks up anomalies so fast.
And in a certain class of work problems, people problems, whatever else, I’m good at some of those things. There are other things. I’d make a lousy corporate banker because I’m not smart enough to see emerging trends, and I’d make a lousy board of directors or non-exec directors because it’s too light touch. I have to understand the data, and I have to feel for the flow of the transaction, or I really have to understand the subject before I can actually contribute meaningfully to it.
So a lot of the work that I do at night or the work I’ll do at the weekend, I’m kinda messing around with a business idea. Most of which go nowhere. Nine out of 10 of my ideas end up in the bin.
I like playing around with ideas and examining them from different angles and trying to find an unusual way of looking at a particular problem or whether there’s a people problem or a motivation problem, or a commercial model problem, or a buyer per cent problem, just thinking about. And it works. It works for me anyway.
Listen to the podcast about controlling your reaction and finding happiness from minutes 7 to 11.
(Geraldine) You have an inner trust. You are absolutely well able to hand over the analytical mind and say, I’m going to trust the process, and you leave it there. It’s not that you’re avoiding it, but you’re leaving it there, and it’s going to cook by itself.
(Niall) Yeah, partly it’s a trust in the mechanism because it has worked for me over the years. Partly it’s a recognition that worrying about it isn’t going to make it any better. One of the great gifts in my life is I’ve had so many near-death experiences from a work perspective that almost nothing fazes me anymore. There are probably multiple occasions along the way when we were definitely gonna run out of money and couldn’t make payroll. The first time that happens, you feel like all of your guts are clenching and what am I going to do? And everyone will think of me as a failure and all that stuff. The second time it happens, it still feels a little bit of that, but not so much cause you muddle your way through. And the third time, this is definitely going to get fixed, so don’t worry about that. How are we going to fix it? And the difference between the three scenarios in fact is nil. It’s how you choose to react.
So you own that reaction moment, and it comes back to that. How will you react to somebody calling you an asshole or somebody telling you that you’re the greatest person in the world or some of you getting really bad news? First of all, is anyone actually going to die here? No. Okay. Then it’s not really a huge problem.
The second thing is, along the way, people have said to me, Oh, you’re a fantastic guy, and equally, or even more people said to me, oh, you’re a total asshole.
And I don’t really care about either because it’s how I feel about myself. So, this obsession with mission and purpose finding your own centre. Happiness, I conclude - it all comes from within. You meet the right girl or boy or whatever else, and they love you, and you love them, whatever else. But in the end, they’re not going to make you happy. You’re going to be happy because you’re with them. And the difference between those two sentences is pretty profound because your career is exactly the same way.
It’s not your employer’s responsibility or your job to make you happy. You’ve got to be happy. They just got to create an environment where you’re happy to be where you are.
(Geraldine) Happiness is a choice for you, Niall?
(Niall) Oh, yeah. And if you’re not happy, then do something about it because you’re only gonna be here for 85 years.
When I was in Digiphone, we got bought by O2 or BT, and then we spun out in O2, in the listing in the IPO. I was a CFO of the Irish operation, and the hundreds of people worked with me, I had a great big salary, and I could eat out every night of the week with the bankers if I wanted cause we had loads of cash sitting in the bank and all that stuff.
I thought this is fantastic because when I was in college, I wanted to get to be a CFO of a big company, feel really important and everything else. And I’ve got to say I was selfish enough to think, yeah, for about a year, this was the greatest thing ever. And I woke up one day, well I didn’t wake up one day, but I became aware of one day that I was turning into a total asshole.
First of all, I became very uncomfortable with it. I was now in a four-line mouse trap where I would find it impossible to go do anything else, and it wasn’t making me happy. It was making me wealthier and it was making me at face value look more important, but that wasn’t actually making me happy.
What I wanted to do was become a general manager of a business, not a CFO. And I wanted to keep creating things, not just sit down and write the status quo. So I quit that job which was the dream job for me. I quit the job and joined Openet.
Listen to the podcast about the purpose of life from minutes 11 to 14.
(Geraldine) That was 2004?
(Niall) Yeah, so I joined as CFO, which is a huge career step back. Largely on the grounds that I figured out I wanted to go try and build something up again and be part of that kind of vibe and bring what I’ve learned first through the Digiphone into Openet. And some of the lessons that I’ve seen from the guys like Barry Maloney, he’d done a brilliant job of building the business, and I thought I could maybe add some of this here and learn something along the way.
And if it all goes horribly wrong, oh, if it goes wrong quick, then I just go back and get a job somewhere else because my CV wasn’t going to be irreparably damaged, but I had no real ambition to start my own business. That’s not the gift I have. But building a business and making something better — that I can do. And that was how I applied, and then, a couple of years later, I got the CEO.
(Mahima) Can we talk a bit more about that transition when you went from working at O2 to realising that this is not making you happy? What was the catalyst for the change going from O2 to a small company? Also, you had talked about figuring out your purpose. Do you know your purpose in life now?
(Niall) Let me say that the purpose thing is probably the most important, fundamental question that everybody’s got their own and it’s different for everybody.
Second of all, it is the hardest thing that I’ve ever taken on in my life. It took me from the time I was a teenager when you don’t know yourself at all. I did a lot of reading - existentialist readings of Sartre and Camus and all these lads. And I was struck at the time, maybe there is no afterlife and all that kind of good stuff, and when you cross that bridge, it’s like eating the apple in the garden of Eden. You keep asking if this is all there is why I don’t just go bananas and go rob banks and be, and stuff like, why would you stay good when you could be bad? And bad looks like a lot more fun for a while, at least.
But I come back to the purpose thing, but it’s, I bore the pants off you with the answer here because it’s something I’m obsessed with. To find out who I was, I needed to grow up, and men don’t grow up until they’re in their mid-thirties.
That’s the straight-up truth. Women know who they are at about the time they are twelve. It’s scary. And it literally takes another 22 to 23 years for a man to actually get to that 12-year-old girl’s stage. But, when you hit that age, the clock starts at that point. For me, now, I’m on a track. I’m not evolving anymore. I’m getting wiser.
And so I spent literally about 15 years thinking about this until I got to a point where I was satisfied with the answer, at least the answer that did for me. And when you have it, the whole world becomes so much more interesting because you stop worrying about it.
I spent all the interim period wondering why I was doing things like what was that all about. Now I don’t wonder. Now I waste my time in lots of other ways, but it’s the biggest stress reliever.
Listen to the podcast about Niall’s career journey from minutes 14 to 22.
Anyway, sorry, I’m miles away from the question you asked, but the transition phase is the transition phase for me was. When I came out of college, and then I did qualifications as a charts accountant. And as soon as I qualified as an accountant, then went off into industry because I didn’t want to stay in practice at the time, wanted to get the industrial experience. And I wanted to get a range of different industries so I could figure out which one I wanted to be in.
So I worked in all manner of places: metal casting company, and a food import company, and all kinds of places. Long story short, I did the last part of my journey that I wanted to go on to try stuff out was I wanted to get involved in either banking or corporate finance, and banking was one that it’s a career thing that you’re in banking and it didn’t strike me as being much fun.
But the opportunity to get involved in corporate finance, I was really interested in because I was working as a financial manager in a company called Coal Distributors Limited who used to do all the black diamond smokeless coal for Ireland basically. So we used to import coal from Poland and America and other places. Smash it all up into pulp and make it into this smokeless fuel, brilliant business, really. Very interesting to actually literally be down on the docks importing stuff and all that kind of carry on. But I did a big, huge restructuring of these companies as the CDL coal distributors, the merger of four or five different real old hundred-year-old companies that different families owned around Ireland. And they merged all the operations because the natural gas was coming in, and coal wasn’t on the agenda. So it needed to have cost energies.
I did all this big, huge tax planning thing for these ancient coal companies, whether it was a hundred grand here or a million quid there and tax losses and finding ways to actually normalise it. And they loved it, had a bowl with this massive mind map on the wall full of all these weird companies.
So I said, okay, I’ll do the corporate finance thing. So I ended up in Deloitte, and I did fundraising, and we partnered into part of the UK Deloitte team. We had Kansas over, and we were doing listing stuff and everything else. It was quite diverse for about two or three years. And I did set up the telecom regulators office, all the back-office accounting schemes and helping write the regulations to fund us and just crazy stuff I’d never touched before, brilliant to be involved.
But a guy who I’d done some work for a company that had been bought by DCC, one of the guys who owned it became the CFO in Digiphone, which was just starting in 97, 98. He rang me up, and he says, you’re not the most awful person I’ve ever worked with. Would you like a job?
At that stage, I was in Deloitte thinking. I was working in Deloitte, and I started working out how many partners have to die before I became a partner, and they were all too young. It could be 15 years before I would become a partner.
That’s not going to do me. Because in practice, you can get unlucky and just miss the window. If you’re too old, they won’t make you a partner. There’s a magic window where that works.
So, I went to Digiphone as a finance manager and then worked my way up. My boss, a couple of years later, when BT bought it, he stepped off and I became CFO and then O2 was founded in BT and we did the IPO, and that probably took about a year and a half, the whole exercise, brilliantly interesting stuff.
And after that settled down, and Ireland was roaring as in the Irish operation was.
(Geraldine) What year are we in, just to give context?
(Niall) About 2001 -2002, and then the company we ran it really well. I have my — one of my best palls was the CFO of the German operation. Just between the two of us, we’d agree to set KPIs. We swapped information and the yield rates on radio towers and all kinds of stuff.
It was really from academically intellectual stimulation. It was fantastic, one of the happiest times of my life as a CFO because you get to mess around with the maths and statistics and seeing stuff happen. And it was great. I then said: okay, we’re trying to set up a business inside the Irish operation because growth was good but finite. There’s only a finite number of human beings in Ireland.
So I came up with a business plan to launch an internal MBNO which would have a totally different brand than O2, would hoover up a load of guys like Meteor at the time, and the Vodafone had bought the aircon businesses that said. But they had a section of the market that we had very little presence in. So we had a lot of older people who paid lots of money, so our earnings were phenomenal. They had a lot of other people who we couldn’t get to because we just didn’t have a market offering that was good enough. But I figured out, I got the man, and we worked on probably four months in this project called Blue Gold and was going to launch this MBNO inside our own network and worked at the whole business plan.
And it was brilliant, and they shut it down, they said, no, they wouldn’t do it.
And that one drove me bananas because basically, the subtext was — just go back and run the business, you’re doing a grand job there, fella, but don’t be bothered. And it cost us nothing to do it, and it killed me.
So I said, okay, that happens. About six months later, I’m sitting in my office, and I just had this idea about mobile data and what mobile data would become. And I used to hang around with a lot of the engineers, who explained to me radio signals propagate and stuff like that.
So we set up in an unlicensed spectrum in 2003. We were video streaming on a thing that was like Skype video. We developed a version of Skype video in the Irish operation for about 12 quid. And I was sitting in my office in Baggot streets as the guys were going around Stephen’s Green with a mobile phone streaming video back to me. And it was like Jesus, can you imagine what we could do with this on learning, security, all kinds of stuff.
So I put together a business plan for mobile data because nobody was doing mobile data at the time. Text messaging was mobile data at the time. The crappy intranet on a browser was mobile data. And there’s this great idea about incorporating video conferencing and all kinds of stuff, and I was off to London for my monthly board meeting, and it was very interesting, and they looked at it again, and I went back the next month to get approval, to go and do something about this. And it was again: you are a great fella, go back to Ireland, run the business. And I thought to myself: this is never going to change. I’m never actually going to be able to do any of these things because Ireland is a cash cow.
And I thought to myself: this is not for me. This isn’t what I wanted to be doing. And it killed me as soon as I got that realisation that I wasn’t happy and that I wasn’t going to be happy.
The genie came out of the bottle, and I couldn’t get it back in. So I started looking around. I started thinking about what I wanted to do and looking around. And I said to myself, look, it’s going to be something to a telco cause that’s what I know. And if I take a very small business, I can get in. I had no experience as a CEO.
So I get in, and I’ll work my way into the job. That’s the best way of doing it. It was either that or go back and do an MBA and try and bullshit my way into a big company, which struck me as being a much longer route. And so I didn’t do a huge amount of thinking about it. I just reached out to people I knew and trusted.
One of them was Barry Maloney, and he was no longer a CEO of Digiphone, obviously, but he was now a venture capitalist. No matter when I used to meet him once every six months for a cup of coffee and just a chat. And I was telling him, here’s my dilemma: I’ve got this platinum-plated job, which I should be happy about and I’m not. And between some of Barry’s advice and a couple of other people who I trust with their advice and this overwhelming sense of I’m wasting time, I’m wasting time doing something I don’t enjoy.
Now, I’m not going to jump off, and I still have a mortgage to pay and all that kind of good stuff. So I would not take a stupid career risk. What I said to myself, I give this thing 12 months and either I’ve got to make a difference in this business or I’m going to just quit and get a job in a big bank.
Listen to the podcast about taking risks and having no regrets from minutes 22 to 25.
What I did was — set the parameters of the risk I was willing to take and gave it a go. And I handed in my notice, and there was consternation, and it was double consternation when they said, where are you going? And, presumably, you’re going to Microsoft or somewhere. Actually going to this very small company.
And the weird part was in the weeks that followed, there were very few people who actually understood why I’d made the decision I had. Very few people took me down for this, but even then, you were almost getting mass cards from people for — “In Memorial to your career, which you’ve now burned to the ground” kind of stuff.
But I didn’t care because if I live my life by what other people thought about me, I’d never be happy, anyway. You can have regard to what other people think, but you shouldn’t be dominated by it?
(Geraldine) You had gone rogue at this stage and off pattern.
(Niall) Yeah, I guess
(Geraldine) As far as people are looking at you, you’re already showing it this day, do you? You were calibre. You were going to make a career, like what’s wrong with you here?
And here’s the thing you’re used to dealing with big budgets, even at that time, then you’re walking into a small business where they’re going — budget? How is the accountant CFO going to handle that?
(Niall) I’ll tell you two things, one sad part of the story, which was important for my journey. And then one very funny part of the story, which is funny and important in a different way.
I had a sister. She was a year and a half older than me, and she died when she was about 40. And I was very close to her. And that was a big shock to everybody because it was one of those very sudden death things. Three coroner’s investigations later, they still couldn’t find any calls. Just didn’t wake up one morning. And that got me thinking a lot about how impermanent life is, and all stuff like this and when you go to a funeral of anyone, probably three days you think like that, and then you go back to normal.
That one, because she was pretty close, it never really went back to normal. So I concluded after that, that I was never going to actually have regrets. Even the bad stuff I do in life, I’m going to be thoughtful about doing it. Don’t get to the end of your life and look back with: I wish I hadn’t done that, or I wish I had done something. Just be happy with the decision. So think of things up front, and then don’t worry about the consequences cause you can’t change the past. You can change the future, but you can’t change the past.
So that was the thing about going rogue. Was, partly, because I was determined not to if I stayed where I was, I’d probably be in a place to retire in my fifties. But I spent the previous ten years awfully unhappy doing a job that was now on autopilot and wasn’t feeding me intellectually. And there’s just this circuit of people who they think they’re doing well. And I just didn’t want to be one of these people. It’s just wasn’t enough for me. So doing something different it wasn’t rebellion, but it was certainly travelling a road that, at the time, I was young enough that I could take a career risk. And if it didn’t work out, I could pay the bill and still get on with my career.
Listen to the podcats about starting at Openet and the relationships with the customers from minutes 25 to 29.
So it wasn’t totally brave, but I arrived at the place. And it’s funny you talk about numbers from the numbers I’ve been dealing with to the numbers in Openet. If you set the year back to the 1st of January and you set the two of the businesses running the entire annual performance of Openet was done by Tuesday afternoon of the first week. It was that context of the change in speed and momentum and complexity that was just astronomical.
I came in like a whirlwind, putting in together planning systems and budgeting systems and everything else. And then it was Tuesday or Wednesday; what am I gonna do now? And it was just so funny, and once you have set up the base plan, the systems were in control.
Once I could get enough information to tell me that the health of the business, then I had enough information in which I could make decisions. And that means I could take risks. So then I went on the road with the sales guys meeting customers and redoing all of our commercial agreements in ways that were going to be attractive to the customers or different at least.
(Geraldine) Niall, you went on the road with salespeople as CFO?
(Niall) As CFO. Most of the customers we had were big telcos, and I just introduced myself to them as a CFO.
As a company, it’s important, the longevity of the business, the security, the business. And I said I am here to make relationships. And if you’ve got a problem with the pricing, you come to me and all that, and it worked really well from a PR perspective, but actually, it meant that if somebody said: I can’t afford support for 12%, I’d be able to very quickly make a decision on the spot. Buying the deal at 11%, will you sign it now?
Now I can probably pull that one-off, but if you make me go back into the office and we negotiate, so it allowed relationships to form. And in the end contracts, the choice of vendor is done by a process, but contracts are written by people.
And so I could do the whole kind of Irish guy, a little something for under the Christmas tree. Give me a PO early. And that was always the give and take was — you can charm your way into getting paid a little bit earlier than maybe they have to, or the purchase order arrives on the 31st of December, not the 1st of January and all that kind of good stuff. If you deliver quality for your customer, unless they are not total assholes, they’ll actually deliver back for you.
But again, it’s thinking through the relationship you want to build with the customer. I don’t want to be the guy whoever wants to go for beers with cause I’m not that funny, but I do want to be the guy that everyone trusts.
And again, this comes back to your purpose and your vision, and who are you? That helps shape that thinking, if you know what I mean, what do I want people to think about me? I can’t control what they actually think, but at least I can put a shape on the direction of where that thought goes.
In some respects, as we came into Openet, the end of the whole thing was an opportunity to take a lot of learning about how to manage people.
Listen to the podcast about managing and inspiring people from minutes 29 to 37.
And when I say manage people, how to put in place a high-performance environment where you could engage people in the business. And I’d read loads of textbooks about it, but actually getting to do in the small, you can never do in the big company. In a small company, you can’t do it. So you can try different compensation schemes, different forms of reward acknowledgement and different domains of information sharing. And you learn a little bit more, or at least I learned a lot more about the kind of people who would work in different dynamic situations and who didn’t.
For me, that’s been fascinating building a rapport between teams and energising people around specific tasks and keeping them motivated even when the business has gone the wrong direction.
(Mahima) How do you keep people motivated? How do you make them create a high-performance environment?
(Niall) Most people want to be good, genuinely, most people, they don’t realise it themselves sometimes, but they want to be — they don’t want to waste their time.
(Mahima) Did you read that? Is that a stat empirical evidence or did, was that your observation?
(Niall) Combination of both. I’d read all the books: “Good to Great”, “Built to last”, and all the other bits of these. And there’s a lot in there, but the best book I ever read was “Mindset” by Carol Dweck. It’s really interesting.
I read a lot. Cause I like templates. I like case studies rather than reading the theory. I like the case study driven approach. And so companies in Ireland - what companies do they admire and what do they admire about them? One of the best companies, in my opinion, in Ireland at the moment is An Post. I think Redmond has done a phenomenal job, but for the vast majority of people in the streets An Post is a sleepy semi-state but what he’s done, if you actually look beyond, it’s something I could aspire to do, but doubt I could. And when you find that kind of example in life, I look to other companies. What did Cisco do? Well, they acquire companies pretty well. Find people in Cisco and find what they did and learn from it and ask questions.
I’m cursed with an insatiable curiosity. If I go on holiday, yeah, Monday, I’m going to be relaxed, and Tuesday, I’m going to be relaxed, and Wednesday, I’m trying to work out how many waiters there are in this restaurant, because surely if they reorganised their route differently. And that’s just the way the mind is.
So how do you do it? Mostly it’s being authentic. And you can explain to people what it is you want. And then you look, and you read the people to find out what they’re motivated. So does a girl who works with us, who’s absolutely brilliant, but has no interest in a career. Just wants to show up and do her job. And I sat down with her and said: am I reading this right? There’s no problem with this, and we can make it interesting in that environment if that’s what you want, and that’s what she wanted. And that’s what we did. So she became the guru in managing sales reporting but her job is to turn in a lot of information and help people inside the parameters of what she wanted in a career, but no interest in promotion, no interest in anything else.
Equally, there’s another girl who came in as, effectively as an admin but was completely lost, but in the course of conversation, it was clear she had loads of talent but had only focused ambition. So I got to do some aptitude tests, and lo and behold, she’s good at marketing. So I got her to do a degree in digital marketing at night, and then gave her a career break in the ladder and said, give it a go.
And over time, people see that’s how you are, that’s who you are dealing with them, and they start self-selecting into the right behaviours.
(Geraldine) I just want to bring you back because I’ve been the CFO in the small company startup scene, so I’m just picturing you coming in, and you’re well-known back then also for your large scale changed management programs.
And I’m just thinking, so your man comes in, we are a small company, great with numbers, and now he’s going to do all of these processes and work templates. And we’re looking at you going knock yourself out. We’re busy over here. This is a flat organisation. You’re used to silos and departments, and we’re going sales and marketing they’re the same people, and actually, sometimes they answer the front door.
So for you, I would never call it a regression. It’s certainly not comparable, but it’s apples and oranges from one organisation culture into the next. How were the people in receiving you into Openet at the time feeling about you?
(Niall) Yeah, again, you a little bit of reading the audience, but I explained to them that I was a quirky booker and I wanted to build a world-class company and that I would keep to myself about this, but wouldn’t it be interesting if we found out X or I got external benchmarks and bring it back and make it relevant for the audience.
And you engage people and make them own the project by making the outcomes sufficiently instinctive for them. So you’re not really imposing something on them. You’re explaining the business value of it, and you’re tweaking the curiosity.
Sometimes they’re not interested, sometimes they are. But then, when you invest in the people afterwards, and you start saying what you can build CV equity if you get good at agile software development. Why doesn’t one just go and learn something about the Cloud, and suddenly, you’re working with them, and it’s a lot of time investment that most people aren’t comfortable doing, whereas I’m very comfortable doing it? Again, it comes down to my comfort level. With me being a total nerd is high, and, definitely, I advertise it.
And over time, they think he’s mostly harmless; he’s a bit quirky, some of that stuff is interesting. So people over time learn to at least they’ll invest with you in exploring an idea.
(Geraldine) And you’ve learned too that one of the keys to life is confessing your idiosyncrasies that no one can hold it against you then.
(Niall) You do need every then and then if you’ve got an urban terrorist in your midst, if you’ve got somebody who’s just not going to fit culturally, take them out with no conscience, no remorse, because you will dilute the value of the rest of the crowd. If you tolerate the wrong behaviours, then none of the people will trust you to recognise when you are doing the right thing.
So you quietly build a performance culture that way. And to answer your question about building performance cultures, you reward and recognise good. You help people design. You explained the outcome. You excite people about the value of it. If we can do this, we’ll save money. And if we save money, we’ll hire more engineers. Then we all get better, and we can win this deal.
You don’t have to spend a huge amount of money doing this. It’s not particularly scientific, but if you also have zero tolerance, that way you reward by your authenticity, your part of the bargain is to create a team environment that is harmonious.
And you don’t have to tell people that you’re firing them because they’re crap if it’s not going to work for you. I’ve only fired one ok, I’ve fired a lot of people, but I’ve had departure conversations with more people. If in the business I have not dealt in the right way, if I would have had to fire them, I would’ve fired them. But when you sit down with people and say, look, I don’t like the way you are in meetings, and I don’t know why it is. So we’ve either got a problem, or we haven’t, but if we have got a problem, I’m not going anywhere. So maybe you want to think about, do you really want to be here? Or can we do something that’s going to fix it?
And when you get there, you help them find a job somewhere else. It’s okay not to fit in it. It doesn’t become a military moment. Do you know what I mean?
Listen to the podcast about the partnership with Joe Hogan and leadership from minutes 37 to 47.
(Geraldine) I think it’s a very powerful point, and I’m really, I’m glad you’re bringing it up because you mentioned propagation earlier on. If you’re willing to tolerate something in an organisation, you are actually as a leader helping the co-creation to contamination, and you’re not protecting the goodness.
Out of curiosity, I want to know this. I happen to know your business partner and long-term friend as well, Joe Hogan. What’s interesting is Joe was the founder of Openet back in 99. My observation is you guys are a fantastic twin set, and this could have been very wrong. I have seen companies fall underneath because of egos and stupidity. I’ve also seen companies who would decide to do co-CEOs or deputy CEO, whatever, but in your case, you’ve divvied out the titles. Your roles are definitely different from your characters. I heard Joe to describe you guys as you’re the captain and he’s the navigator.
I don’t think that there’s a fair or more graceful way to call it but what I do want to know is when you walked in the door back in 04, as CFO, Joe was there in its very strong capacity. How did it roll out to being the great partnership that it is, but yet the titles are the way they are?
(Niall) I guess, when I joined as CFO, it was a different dynamic in the sense that Joe was on the board. He was a founder, the VCs, and Joe was pretty upfront about the stuff that he wasn’t comfortable with or didn’t have a lot of interest in spending time on. And funny enough, it was good in the sense that the yin and yang fit because the stuff he wasn’t interested in is the stuff that I actually love: the boardroom politics, the raising money, all these kinds of things. The stuff that he’s interested in, the uncertain point, couldn’t be. I couldn’t care less. It leaves me totally cold.
So it worked out really well because Joe and I in the first interview had this long debate about because he was very keen: as a CFO, you better not stifle me building new products. And I said, look, as a CFO, I’ll be the first guy to champion, as long as you’re not building a shit that no one would buy.
And it was as blunt as that. He said, what do you mean? And we talked through some of the business case approvals and how I would look at business cases. And it just went from there because we then started incrementally in that first meeting, building up if we did it this way, then we could do it that way.
So from get-go, there’s serious compatibility as in we get on very well anyway. Largely it undergrads Joe has loads of brains and very little ego and a great deal of self-awareness. He knows what he wants. He had set up some businesses before he was experienced enough to know there were whole parts of this stuff to the either wasn’t very talented at or, and he wasn’t talented because he just didn’t want to do it. And so I was going to take a lot off his plate. And for me, it was the same thing. As I say I can innovate as well. I can take something and put a bit of marketing spin on it, or market the message or tailor the message. Somebody will buy something off me. Cause I do sincere really well, and Joe will build some of the most amazing things in the world or inspire people who he’s working with to build amazing things.
He can evangelise and have people absolutely believe in things, but Joe does not believe in the evilness of people. Whereas, I live in a world where all people are evil until they’re proven not. And so procurement people for me, I love it, we’re going to battle.
It was a skill set mix, which worked really well. And when it came down to the CEO thing, We had that conversation with Joe at the time, and I said, look, this is going to be a problem, or it’s not, and if it’s going to be a problem, then I’m not gonna do it. And I don’t care terribly much, because I prefer not to do it, then do it if it’s going to cause friction, but as you’re the vendor and you are a CTO so how are we going to work this?
Cause if you go rogue on me and suddenly I’m getting invited to meetings, and you’re not, and you’re getting pissed off. I said, if we get into that place, it all goes horribly wrong. So we dealt with it all upfront because this co-CEO model, I said, nope, not interested. That’s the one thing I won’t do is have two sets of hands on the steering wheel.
The car needs to be having one driver, and there can be no ambiguity about it. Now, I would always consult with Joe about the important decisions all the way along. But in the end, I make the decisions. Now, he trusted me enough not to be full of ego and do things without him. And I trusted him enough to know that once we had debated something that was there
Now, I think, over the years, Joe and I probably had two or three moments of serious disagreement. But usually, he came to his senses, and I forgave him.
(Geraldine) So in fairness to you both, Openet success you can put it down into a lot of luck and this, that, and the other, but it is this energy, and right now down to 2020 Openet success and Amdocs win has been you and Joe’s relationship and emotional intelligence, and that’s not the kind of stuff you read across the Irish Times. You read, oh, Amdocs has bought the Openet for 155 million. And here are the people, I’m like, come on in between these paragraphs, the powerhouse is the two people that actually managed to put this together and keep it together.
(Niall) So, it was definitely a triumph in the first instance, for the longevity was and staying on purpose and staying on point, there were probably two or three occasions when it looked horribly black as an outcome. And there were other times when alternatives were put on the table, which were very tasty, somebody shows up off your big job, and you’re looking at going to uncertain future with an uncertain outcome or not.
But staying the course was, I don’t recall a single day where there were any doubts of the outcome being unsuccessful, not a single day. Now, utterly irrational, completely irrational, but I figured with the brainpower we had, and I don’t mean just Joe and I but the people generally. But actually, in 20 years, at different stages, you’ve got to rebuild your management team because people get tired on the journey.
And when the company is small, it suits some people in one way, and when the company gets bigger, people don’t always adapt well to it. Joe did, I did, the management team we built, particularly the management team for the last five years of the company. A lot of people were tired and wanted to go. So I engineered that they could go and that they could sell some of their options, and they didn’t make huge money, but they made something.
But the only thing I said to them is do not leave and go to a shit job, stay until you get a better job, but I’ll help you that way. So it’s not their fault they’re tired. You treat people like you’d like to be treated, and then you garner their loyalty. But when we rebuilt the team, it was with some absolutely brilliant guys as we worked with.
And we did the last figures, particularly with the most extraordinary in the history of the company, because while we had to take some ugly decisions about rebasing the business model away from humans towards more automation, so we were letting some people go.
As many of them as we could, we retrained. And we were hiring all the time, running out of money. So there were about five different things going on at the same time, but it was largely the CEO. And this is something that Joe and I talked to them about because it’s down to the CEO. You don’t share your pain or your anxiety with your people. That’s selfish.
Your job is to inspire people and not have them lack confidence. Say, don’t lie to them. You don’t go and say, ooh, I think we mightn’t be here next year; I’m not sure what it’s all about. This is stuff that’s only in a relationship when people feel they have to get things off their chest. You only share with people when you’re actually going to be beneficial to the other person, for them to know things. So it’s not about you feeling better. It should be about them. But that last five years when we rebuilt the company and rebooted it, involved so many moving parts about helping exit some of the old shareholders and get them a return by getting new shareholders in and changing the management team and changing the marketing message, and rebuilding the technology with no market in sight.
