Mike Austin uses a personal deep-sea fishing anecdote to illustrate how managing large software vendors (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc.) requires a coordinated team rather than an individual. Key recommendations: form role-specific teams (data/usage analysts, an experienced lead/"skipper" to interpret usage/data, supportive functions like finance/legal/procurement), treat vendors as part of the people ecosystem, maintain frequent, scheduled communication (daily quick check-ins and recurring meetings), and take decisive, continuous action rather than avoiding difficult conversations (noting similar behavior during 2008 and 2020 downturns).
Chapters
Right. And like we talked, like we said, so we're going to go out of budget into people now, you know who's on the team, right? This is so key because you can't do this yourself. It has to be a team. And you know, I, when, when I was at Microsoft, I'd actually won President's Club and it was a trip to Hawaii. And on one of the, the days they had a bunch of events that you could do and my wife and I looked at it, there wasn't really anything that we were all that interested in. But the one thing that we did see was this deep sea fishing. And we thought, well, at least we can go out and be on for the day. Let's do that. And immediately when we made the decision and signed up, my stomach sunk because I actually get really seasick. And so when we, anyways, we end up going and we get out on the boat, it was end of season, so the fishing wasn't great. And we were out there for about two hours. And true to form, I, I got seasick and ended up passing out in the, in the, the cabin. And I heard the skip yellow fish on and, and it's a big one. And I jumped up and jumped into the seat and saw it jump and go down. And you know, long story short, I caught a 500 pound blue marlin and the skip had told me, he said it's going to take, you know, all, all four of you on the boat probably about four or five hours to pull this thing in. And I happened to be able to pull it in in 45 minutes myself. Now I say myself, but it wasn't myself. It was a team effort. The skip was there telling me when to sort of lean forward and squat so that I could reduce the drag on the line and when to reel in. And the, you know, was using the fish finder to figure out where this thing was. So you think about, you know, that he was fighting where it was. He was also backing the boat up to reduce the drag on the line so it didn't snap or would pull forward to help tire out the fish. You know, my wife and team were there, they were, you know, my wife was pouring water on my head to support me because it was so hot, right. And so I bring up this story because it's very much like dealing with a software vendor in a situation like this, right? You need a team, you need a captain that knows how to use a fish finder to find the data. So how do I go find that data to figure out how much of M365 we're using. You need a skip that knows how to interpret that data. So he knew how to, you know, watch the waves and figure out what the fish was doing and watch the line and so watch that data, figure out how to use that. They need a supportive team to help you finance legal, procurement. It, it's a whole team approach in order to beat those, you know, monsters like you know, Microsoft and Oracle and IBM and all these software, right? And so the thing is when you're doing this, it's all hands on deck, right? So you need to develop your team or teams because you know the team doing Microsoft may have similar people but it might be different than the, the team that you need to do Oracle or IBM. So you need to make sure that you develop the team and that the team sees what you're doing and knows what results you're trying to, you know, you're trying to get right and, and are getting. And the key thing is to let them know what they need to do and how they can help. Right? Like the worst thing you can have is have somebody on the team saying to, you know, one of your vendors, oh, you know, yeah, they're just trying to get savings. We know it's not going to happen. So just, you know, just do what you need to do. Like we see that happen under teams undermining themselves internally, right? The people include your vendors, right? It's not just you, but it's people that include your vendors. So what's your account team look like? What's your relationships with executives work like? Do you know how to work up their, their chains of command in order to get things done and you want to obsess over getting results them, but you also want to over communicate with them, right? Like you cannot allow them to go weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks without responding. And that's one of their strategies during this will be just don't respond, right? And so you want to schedule daily, quick check ins, whether that's with the team, your internal team, whether that's with the vendors, whether that's collectively. You definitely want to have recurring team meetings. You know, if you're trying to work specifically with a vendor, how often do you need to do that? Is it weekly, bi weekly, monthly, you know, internally, what's the frequency of that? But the most important thing is to take action, action and lots and lots of action, right? We saw it in 2020, we and I saw it in 20 2008. So many people bury their head in the sand and are just trying not to do anything to rock the boat. They don't want to be seen. Internally, people are worried about getting laid off, so they don't want to be seen at the vendors. It's the same thing. Or they don't want to have the difficult conversations, so they just don't do anything. That's the worst thing you can do. The most important thing you can do, if I could emphasize anything, is take action. And lots and lots of.
