Ralph Loura, Co-founder of Sustainable IT.org and former CIO – Catalytic Transformation is 99% Mindset

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): Hi! I'm Tracy Lovejoy.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: And I'm Shannon, Lucas. We are the co-ceos of catalyst constellations which is dedicated to empowering catalyst to create bold, powerful change in the world.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): This is our podcast move, fast, break ship burnout where we speak with catalyst executives about ways to successfully lead transformation in large organizations.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): And today we're very excited to be with one of our favorite folks, Ralph. Laura. Ralph is an accomplished leader. He has won myriad awards. He's known across our community and multiple communities as a catalyst, as a connector. He's had a wildly successful career as a CEO. Since some of the world's most iconic brands he's been at Hewlett Packard at the Clorox group, and he brings a really strong combination of it expertise, business acumen and

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): track record of transformation which have been some of my favorite conversations with him. He's known for his experience in both technology and management, not always a perfect combo.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): He now provides support, guidance and strategy to businesses and boards, and he's the co-founder of sustainableit.org one of his passion projects these days a nonprofit that brings technologists to the table and into the conversation, and they've been so successful in getting into the conversation that they spoke at Davos this past January, and again, they're going to be there in January 2025, and he was just in New York at climate week.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): Ralph. Thank you so much for spending time with us here today.

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Ralph Loura: Super excited. Can't wait to have our our chat.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): So would love to turn that, you know I gave a little bit about your background, but turn it over to you to tell us.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): How do you see your career highlights? And what were those catalytic moments of transformation that you feel really show that catalytic nature.

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Ralph Loura: Yeah, it's interesting. I'm not one of these, like, you know.

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Ralph Loura: these people who believe in fate, or you know whatever. But, like, somehow.

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Ralph Loura: most of my even early in life, and you know, through school and other things, I've kind of ended up in the right place at the right time, sort of unintentionally, certainly never a strategy behind it. But like, I've just sort of shown up where.

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Ralph Loura: you know, there's a lesson to be learned, or I was in the place that I needed to be when I needed to be there. So like I grew up, you know, in a in a actually a farming community in rural New York.

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Ralph Loura: Neither of my parents had ever gone to college, so I had no navigation. I had no.

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Ralph Loura: you know. Example.

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Ralph Loura: and you know I took the sats, applied to a bunch of colleges and got into a few.

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Ralph Loura: and I just haven't made a plan yet, and

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Ralph Loura: of all things. A guy. I went to high school with his brother had gone to Notre Dame.

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Ralph Loura: and he was going to end up going to this little school a couple hours south of Notre Dame, in Indiana.

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Ralph Loura: and his dad didn't want him to go all the way out there and not know anybody

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Ralph Loura: so unbeknownst to me. He took, went to my school, got some tapes of me playing football, send to the football coach.

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Ralph Loura: and I get this random call.

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Ralph Loura: hey? This is Coach Jennings. We'd like to talk about playing football with it. I'm like.

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Ralph Loura: you're who where are you? But it? And it ended up being an amazing experience for me. So it's a small Liberal arts school, a thousand student total enrollment.

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Ralph Loura: And I was very interested in sort of math and computer science and sciences in general. And I'm like, I don't know liberal arts if they have the right program. And somehow he sort of convinced me. This was the place for me, and it was

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Ralph Loura: I ended up there, and instead of going into some like, I would probably go to search university or rit, or one of these. Like larger institutions in my home state. I ended up in this.

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Ralph Loura: you know, small place, and I come from a small town where I could be myself. I could interact. I was comfortable. And you know, I had access to

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Ralph Loura: the computer. I'm almost unlimited access to my professors, and I still, you know, to this day, 40 plus years later, keep in touch with one of my old college professors on Facebook and

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Ralph Loura: it was just the kind of experience I needed at the time.

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Ralph Loura: and I ended up, instead of maybe getting lost in the shuffle. I ended up finding kind of my passion.

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Ralph Loura: And so I know I was a dual major in math and and computer science and

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Ralph Loura: you know, like I was a volunteer in the computer lab, I, ended up

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Ralph Loura: because of, like a roommate of mine getting talked into running for student government. So I ended up vice president of this class. And then the next year I was

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Ralph Loura: the President's student body. And I, you know, and I like I had all these experiences that I probably wouldn't have ever had. So I just balanced between, you know, the geeky math and science side of things, and you know, kind of politics and social and leadership that just turned out to be the right

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Ralph Loura: nurturing environment at the time.

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Ralph Loura: And and and then I was like, Okay, now, what am I gonna do for a living like, where am I? Gonna what job am I gonna get?

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Ralph Loura: And

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Ralph Loura: And I was very focused on

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Ralph Loura: where I like, I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to do something cool.

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Ralph Loura: And this is

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Ralph Loura: 1986.

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Ralph Loura: And I was looking around, going well, the really cool, all the cool work that I liked in the computer world was being done at the labs like they'd invented, unix and invented C. They were working on some really interesting networking stuff.

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Ralph Loura: and I'm like, I want to go work for Bell Ellis.

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Ralph Loura: And and this is so.

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Ralph Loura: not the

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Ralph Loura: you know, toot my own horn. I guess I was. So. It's a small school.

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Ralph Loura: but I was valedictorian, and I had a 4.0, and I had all these accolades. All this stuff, so I had a pretty good resume. But I literally sent out one. Resume

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Ralph Loura: to one job. You know. I didn't go interview a bunch of companies I didn't look for like the best job I was like, I want to work there. And I had the interview got the job, and I went to work for Bell Labs.

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Ralph Loura: And again, it was the right place for me at the time.

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Ralph Loura: I got to do some really interesting work with some really amazing people. And I started out in in Chicago. I ended up

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Ralph Loura: in New Jersey, at the headquarters at Bellows Research.

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Ralph Loura: and you know my my users were Brian Kernagan and Dennis Ritchie and Rob Pike, and you know, Bill Corin, and like literally the people that you know, wrote the book. And then the technology brought me there. In the 1st place, I mean, we used to go to. We used to go to you know, Brian Kernagan's house on Thursday nights because he had a pool.

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Ralph Loura: We swim is full, and we'd go and watch laser discs in it because it is a big laser disc collection, and like, and I hung out with all these, you know, brilliant scientists, and, you know, kind of understood in part one of the one of the big, so kind of long story short, one of the big lessons through all of that was.

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Ralph Loura: Oh, no

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Ralph Loura: innovation. Disruption prints whatever you want to call it. The catalytic transformation. For me. It ended up being like 99% of it was about mindset. It was about how you

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Ralph Loura: of how you looked at the world

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Ralph Loura: like a lot of people, and I still know a lot of people at Bellevs that spent 40 years. They had a great career.

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Ralph Loura: but they're still there kind of doing their

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Ralph Loura: the job, the incremental job over 40 years that they signed up for and they had, and which is wonderful for them. I knew that wasn't going to be what I wanted to do.

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Ralph Loura: And part of it is they have the mindset of. Well, I'm gonna get the next project, and I'm gonna do that a little better. And I'm gonna get the next project and so on. And I was just kind of restless. I wanted

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Ralph Loura: to do the I wanted to do something different. But so, for instance, my 1st job, I was a

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Ralph Loura: I was an Assembly language programmer for a front end processor on an Mdel mainframe running unix like this, you know. Weird, super, deep, geeky down in the weeds, job.

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Ralph Loura: But I was frustrated because we had to queue up

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Ralph Loura: like in the batch job to compile our code overnight, and it just seemed inefficient, and some workstations just come out. So I asked my office, and I complained to our boss for like 3 months

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Ralph Loura: about all this, and so he he went out, and he bought 3 sun workstations for us gave him to us in a lab.

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Ralph Loura: and we ported all the cross compilers over, built our own environment, and all of a sudden we could compile our code in like an hour and a half instead of overnight.

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Ralph Loura: And the next thing you know, like half the workload of the computer center is running, you know, in our cluster, because you could

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Ralph Loura: code in the morning, go to lunch and come back and have results.

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Ralph Loura: and which is kind of how I stumbled into it because I never planned on being an It leader.

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Ralph Loura: And that's kind of been, you know.

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Ralph Loura: the history of my career is more and more about being seeking out the things that were kind of different.

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Ralph Loura: trying to look at things from a different lens and and then bringing, you know, a kind of different way of doing things to the table.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): When did you know that? That's what you were doing

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): right like, you know that you were actually with it, with consciousness, seeking out something different versus intuitively doing that.

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Ralph Loura: Yeah, it's interesting. So

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Ralph Loura: Bell Labs was a great place to be from at, and T. Had a hundred 25 year old company.

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Ralph Loura: They had a great like. They taught leadership in a very systematic way. It was this thing called the General, the Gei General executive instructions. It was a 3 ring binder literally anything, any topic. Somebody walked in your office and said, You know the a light pole fell on my car. You could turn to the page and this tab that said light pole car. And it would tell you what to do like. It was that detail. It was super great.

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Ralph Loura: So you had this like good support system, so that you you could figure out the right answer to things and the right structure. But it was a business built on innovation. So they also valued people that did things differently.

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Ralph Loura: But but every year we would get our, you know, our review and my review was always, it was fairly positive, but always had something.

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Ralph Loura: I don't know the kind of work equivalent with

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Ralph Loura: not, that does not work and play well with others. But sort of does you? You do things a little differently, and even for for Bell Labs it was sort of like, well, you're

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Ralph Loura: like, you're you're making waves like and and and so.

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Ralph Loura: after I don't know about 8 or 9 years, I figured out that make that there's 2 different ways to make waves. There's ways to make waves where you annoy people and disrupt the system.

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Ralph Loura: and maybe don't create super value. And it took me a while to figure this out. I had a great mentor who sent me now, and you know.

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Ralph Loura: kind of beat me over the head of it a few times, so I could. I would listen and and then said, Hey, you know you, you can do really great things, and this

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Ralph Loura: tendency of yours can be really valuable, but you know you should. You should use it in a different way. And one of the things that really frustrated me earlier was when people wouldn't like. I'm like, Hey, I'm trying to do good things here like like you're not on board. You don't get it. And people would be resisting.

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Ralph Loura: And one of the things he said to me was,

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Ralph Loura: so that makes sense to them.

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Ralph Loura: Well, I'm like, what does that mean? Because, you know. Nobody shows up to work every day thinking, how can I make this harder

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Ralph Loura: for everybody around me like they show up to work thinking, Yeah, I want to do good work. I want it. I want this to be fun. I want this to be interesting.

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Ralph Loura: And if they're fighting you, it's because it makes sense to them. So so you have to figure out, why is it? It makes sense like, what is it about what you're doing that doesn't fit. How do you maybe bridge that gap? Or or maybe in some cases it it's never going to make sense to them, and it's time for you to find some other place to kind of go, you know it's your battle.

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Ralph Loura: And so that was probably 10 years into my career. I kind of finally figured that out.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): So, reading the reviews and seeing this pattern about yourself, of being different, and wanting to do different things, having a mentor whacked you upside the head of like. You're a wave maker, and you can do it in an awesome way, or you can be a tidal wave, essentially, and not a nice, awesome way. And then this this particular wisdom from your mentor, it makes sense to them. How do you bridge that gap.

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Ralph Loura: Yeah.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): So as you then move forward in your career. Were you intentional about always seeking places where you could be looking for things to do different, or was it? You know some of these stories feel a little happenstance? And so at some point did kind of Ralph take control, or what happened.

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Ralph Loura: Yeah, I mean, there is. Opportunity comes in for any, or it doesn't. But it's your choice as to where you steer.

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Ralph Loura: where you steer the ship. And so yeah. So, for instance, after Bell Labs, I left and I spent

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Ralph Loura: a little time on Wall Street I worked for a company called the Ishawn Company, a hedge fund running systems there. And it was a very interesting experience, very different. And at that point it was like, Hey, I've been in tech. I've been in kind of the academic side of tech.

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Ralph Loura: and I really wanted to do something. I wanted to be in business and like, what? What more businesses than Wall Street? So I sought out, specifically sought out a different environment like a bit of a career change and see kind of part of this was, can I play? Can I play in this space, or should I stick to some more? You know, Researchy, place, that kind of gets innovation. So on.

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Ralph Loura: and and I enjoyed that experience. And then from there, I had an opportunity. I had an interview, a set of interviews at Goldman Sachs. I went through, counted 28 interviews. It took like 6 weeks. It's crazy.

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Ralph Loura: And and then on the on like the 24th week.

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Ralph Loura: I got a call from a recruiter at at Cisco Systems.

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Ralph Loura: and they said, Hey, we're recruiting for this job like we'd like to talk to you and I said, Well.

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Ralph Loura: you know, I really don't waste your time like I'm at the end of this pipeline, like I know I'm getting an offer.

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Ralph Loura: and this way, don't you know? Humor us like we're we're we're actually pretty quick at things.

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Ralph Loura: I and there's the recruiter said something like, Hey, what's the worst case. You fly to California. You you have a nice day. You spend the weekend. You go home like, okay. So I flew to California. I had a day long slate of, I think I interviewed like 10 people through the day. At the end of the day. Pete Solvik was the CEO at the time.

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Ralph Loura: Pete took me in a room off one of the lobbies, and we set for 2 h and had

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Ralph Loura: a great interview, and one of my questions to Pete was, This is late nineties

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Ralph Loura: was kind of like he just goes. You've been splitting stock and growing like, you know, isn't all the interesting stuff done like what's left.

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Ralph Loura: And then he laid out the

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Ralph Loura: you know, here's the next. Here's what's what's driving growth. And here's where we are, where we're headed.

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Ralph Loura: And it was very compelling. So I like, for the weekend flew home, and on Monday morning I'm waiting for literally waiting for the Fedex package from Goldman with the offer to come in.

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Ralph Loura: and I got a phone call from Pete.

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Ralph Loura: Well, they're not for Cisco

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Ralph Loura: and

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Ralph Loura: and for me. I was like, wait a minute like

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Ralph Loura: it took 6 weeks for these guys to decide like they wanted me and Cisco. It was like, you know, 3 days.

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Ralph Loura: and and they get to the point where they had an offer approved offer that they could make.

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Ralph Loura: And so it was. And it turns out, it was. Actually.

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Ralph Loura: you know, the Goldman job was like a Vp of something the pay was better. A bunch of other things were better. Cisco's lower pay. It was more, you know, back end equity left upfront. It was a director title, not a Vp title and a bunch of other things. But I took me 10 min of thinking to go like, you know, it's obvious where I need to be. I want to be someplace that can make decisions that understands value that wants somebody. That's a change agent. And so I took the job. Cisco and kind of never looked back.

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Ralph Loura: It ended up really changing the trajectory of my whole career.

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Ralph Loura: and that was, you know, that's that intentionality. And then, like, when I left Cisco.

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Ralph Loura: I had 2 opportunities. One was Cisco had. I've gone through the bubble growth, and then the bubble adverse, and so doing all the kind of the 1st 3 years we were 22 companies. The stock split every 8 months. We grew like crazy. We're hiring a thousand engineers a quarter. It was like insane.

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Ralph Loura: And then the last year I was there, and we started laying off people the 1st time in history we were trying to figure out how to be grown ups. You know. So we had a lot of committee meetings where we started to design the committee.

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Ralph Loura: And I was essentially offered what what I would call.

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Ralph Loura: I'm sure they they wouldn't put. I would have called the time a vip job a best in peace job like, hey? We don't have anything really exciting for you right now. But, like, here's our consolation price. We want you to go run amia, so run it for Europe, Middle East, and Africa like, be an expert for a couple of years, and like, when all this blows over and like we're back to growth again, we'll bring it back, and there'll be something sexy and exciting for you to do and like you're back on your growth path.

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Ralph Loura: And then another job, which is some ex, some Cisco people that left Cisco at the time

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Ralph Loura: that went to simple technologies in Long Island.

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Ralph Loura: and simple was a mess it had gone through. It was kind of the they had their enron tyco moment.

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Ralph Loura: 11 of the

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Ralph Loura: 12 Ecom members were terminated, 3 were indicted. It was a mess. And so a bunch of these guys came in to kind of take it over and clean it up. So Bill Newty was CEO. John Bruno came over as chief marketing officer. So once a Cisco guys that I know.

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Ralph Loura: And then John called me and said, Hey, like I need a CIO.

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Ralph Loura: I'm like dude like I'm not moving to Long Island like, what are you crazy?

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Ralph Loura: And then I looked at the and looked at my wife, and I thought we had some a business trip, and my wife came along, and we're on the plane on the way back, talking about Europe and a bunch of other things. And maybe this is like, you know, like, I don't want to go

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Ralph Loura: bread water for 2 years, like, I want to go do something.

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Ralph Loura: It's an opportunity to do something. And so we went to Long Island, and we spent

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Ralph Loura: 3 years like working harder than I ever have in my life. We every Monday we'd wake up and see if we get delisted. Yet we restated 5 years worth of earnings rebuilt the entire controls. Environment reimplemented sap. We took sap from like a 3.5 to 4 7. I we skipped like 4 release upgrades. Sap said it couldn't be done. So we did all this stuff in 3 and a half years took the company from a billion 3, I think, to a billion 7 to 2 acquisitions, and then ultimately sold the company in Motorola.

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Ralph Loura: It was like chaos for 3 years, but I learned so much in that 3 years about

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Ralph Loura: creating intentionality, creating transformation. So one of these, John said, we spent all this time we created this big transformational program to behind all this work. And so you're taking a bunch of people that lived through some really tough times at symbol and trying to convince them like, hey, this is the future. And we're going to get this done. And they're looking at you like, you know, you guys are nuts like, we've never done this much work before. There's no way. This is gonna even the vendor says you can't do this, and we're like, no, no, we got this. It's gonna be fine.

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Ralph Loura: and we had we we actually created a marketing campaign internally called, imagine a symbol where? So imagine a symbol where, you know onboarding, we can bring somebody on a day like all these things we're trying to accomplish.

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Ralph Loura: And and then we we had this big launch, and we went through half a day thing. We brought all it through.

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Ralph Loura: And then, later in the week, I'm like frustrated. Because again, I'm like all these people like, Don't get it, and John pulled me aside and said, You know.

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Ralph Loura: like John's like, you know, how long did it take you to get there? You've been working on this for like months. You spent 4 months like 12 HA day building this thing and convincing yourself and lining up everything like you give them 4 h like you gotta bring them all like they need to get there. They need to catch up. And so I spent a bunch of time working on mindset working on getting them caught up getting them on board. How? Why, I believe what? I believe, how we were going to get there, connecting all the dots, and that made a huge difference, and we delivered

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Ralph Loura: the 4, 7, 9 upgrade. We delivered a transformation, and how we did, manufacturing from build to stock to assemble to order. We delivered a a transformation of it from all onshore to a box model using a

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Ralph Loura: big organization in in India and a big organization. For now all this in like 3 and a half years.

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Ralph Loura: Yeah, it's crazy.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): It is amazing.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): One of the things that's so loud for me is you tell these amazing stories you started off by telling us you don't believe in fate.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): You do believe that you ended up at the right place at the right time.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): Can we know like, was there something that told you which choices were the right place at the right time.

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Ralph Loura: Yeah, the-the-

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Ralph Loura: so what I, in a way, what I started doing and I started I don't know. Early in life, unintentionally, and then later.

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Ralph Loura: recognizing the pattern, intentionally

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Ralph Loura: doing things that I found uncomfortable.

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Ralph Loura: So you know, picking up and moving to Silicon Valley from after I'd spent most of my career in the East Coast like

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Ralph Loura: uncomfortable working for a

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Ralph Loura: you know, a a tech company like Cisco, you know, I had a little bit of imposter syndrome like, do I really belong here? And here I'm this leader that's supposed to change things. And like.

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Ralph Loura: you know, I don't know anything about Silicon Valley and

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Ralph Loura: so doing things that were uncomfortable. And that's kind of in my, from a, both from a people, leadership and opportunity perspective, but also from a technology perspective. I you know I you know I was a very technical person early in life. I still am somewhat

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Ralph Loura: technical, certainly not hands on but I've always something new comes along, and I'm like, that's really intriguing, like I know nothing about that. And it's a bit freaky that I don't like to know not know about something, and so I'll go do the thing that looks

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Ralph Loura: scary and new and uncomfortable. I'll go spend time unpacking, you know, when Blockchain came out. I was like, I don't know nothing about blockchain, but I got to go figure out how blockchain works. So I spent a bunch of time on understanding ecosystem, you know. AI, generative AI and Llms. I knew a bit my in grad school. I took my my grad school. A focus was AI and natural language processing. But this is old school. AI.

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Ralph Loura: So I know a little bit about the the way AI was approached at the time, and the generating Llms kind of stuff very different. And I found that fascinating and kind of a bit unnerving because it's like, I don't know anything about this.

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Ralph Loura: and I need to know about this.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: I'd love to jump in on that, because it's actually not something that we talk a lot about like even in the book. And you know, in all of the conversations you know, we talk about how catalysts have a more positive relationship with change.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: and so I can hear some of the excitement, but we don't often talk about like, but it doesn't mean that we're not uncomfortable.

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Ralph Loura: Oh, yeah.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: And like you'll jump into a whole new industry, or you'll jump into a whole new like, you know, skip 2 levels to get to the CIO from a director of it like how did you? How did you manage that uncomfortability? And I also heard the word imposter syndrome in there, which I think is a very common experience for catalyst, too.

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Ralph Loura: Yeah,

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Ralph Loura: there is a level of kind of getting comfortable, being uncomfortable.

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Ralph Loura: and it's just a

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Ralph Loura: and I'm and I'm I'm generally a you know, a team builder, a collaborative builder. I'm the kind I'm the kind of person that tries to make everybody happy in the room.

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Ralph Loura: So like when I'm uncomfortable. It's it's hard for me, because I I really want peace and

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Ralph Loura: terminate around me.

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Ralph Loura: which is part of, I think why it works because I'm in a room where I'm uncomfortable, or in a situation where I'm uncomfortable, and what I'm trying to do that whole time is bring harmony to that discomfort. So if I go to environment where

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Ralph Loura: there's price or chaos, or challenge, or something.

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Ralph Loura: you know my instinct, my, you know every fiber of my being is about. Hey? How do I get to a place where, like we're not

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Ralph Loura: under siege here, and we're in a happy place. And so that's where I spend all my energy. And, by the way, that's also when I know it's time to leave. So it's been hard. One of the hardest things is

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Ralph Loura: you go to a great place. You build a great team, you do great work, and you're super happy with all you've accomplished.

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Ralph Loura: And then

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Ralph Loura: what I found is, if I stay too long

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Ralph Loura: and mess it up because I'm really good at

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Ralph Loura: fixing things or finding broken things and trying to fix them. But if there's nothing broken. I will find something to fix, whether it needs to be fixed or not.

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Ralph Loura: And I and there's a an old guy I worked with it at at Cisco.

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Ralph Loura: I won't mention his name. His 1st name was Malik. He'll he'll recognize himself.

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Ralph Loura: And he we had a bunch of, you know, a bunch of data centers and a bunch of assets, and of course you'd go to the end of the quarter or the end of the year, and you'd have all these assets you couldn't locate, and you're trying to figure out if they'd appreciate it or not. And all this so it's a big spreadsheet. And it was like 3 million dollars worth of stuff.

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Ralph Loura: and Malloc was assigned to go hunt down all these assets and figure out where they are.

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Ralph Loura: dispose of them, and so on.

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Ralph Loura: You did a fabulous stuff within like 3 months

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Ralph Loura: he'd gotten 80% of it done within 5 months. He had 99% of it done, and he wouldn't stop. There's like a handful of you know. There's like nothing left. It's all rounding error like we could write this off. It's not a big deal, but he didn't know how to stop. He drove people crazy. I had people in my office like, yeah.

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Ralph Loura: dude like we've already got it all like. Can he leave me alone? Can you tell him to stop bothering me? And I had to pull, and I later had a I mentored Malik for a long time, and we he was a great guy, and he's been great, but like it's 1 of those like. Sometimes you have to know when, like your some of your strengths in certain

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Ralph Loura: problems and environments, could turn it out to be real irritation points and others. And you've got to understand when when to apply them. So for me.

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Ralph Loura: I'm not good at status quo. I'm not good at.

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Ralph Loura: you know, managing the boring stuff so which is part of my why, my career has been kind of a series of jobs I've had for 4 or 5 years. I come in, do the work, and then I have to know when to find the door

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Ralph Loura: and find the next challenge, so I don't drive people crazy.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Okay? 2, 2 follow-up questions. There, I'll start with where you ended, which is like, how do you know what are the signs that it's like, Okay, it's time. It's time for Ralph to find the new thing.

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Ralph Loura: So example of Clorox. I was CIO for the Clark's Company for a while, and I work for a great leader.

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Ralph Loura: Frank Tatasio and

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Ralph Loura: Frank and I were actually on a trip to India

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Ralph Loura: looking both at the it stuff. But also, you know, Clorox, looking at some of the consumer goods market in India, and how that worked.

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Ralph Loura: And we're sitting act actually in a

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Ralph Loura: you know, in the bar of the hotel, after 3 or 4 days in. And and Frank said something to me about like, basically like, you gotta slow down

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Ralph Loura: like, what do you mean? And he's like, you know.

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Ralph Loura: you make. You've been here. You've done a great job. You've cleaned things that you've had it.

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Ralph Loura: You've really transformed our analog company in in digital ways, and it's been great.

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Ralph Loura: but like people are like exhausted. You're way out up front. You gotta wait for people to catch up.

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Ralph Loura: I sat and thought.

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Ralph Loura: I'm like we are so far behind.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Like we got.

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Ralph Loura: Faster. And you're telling me to slow down. I'm like, Okay, it's time it's time for me to go.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Warning, totally.

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Ralph Loura: And and which is and, by the way, we were both right like for me, I was too far behind what I saw coming.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah.

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Ralph Loura: Frank was right for the Clorox Company and their business model and their margin structure. They were doing just fine. They had done a great job of competing and catching up and leading in many ways. So had I stayed, I would have cavitated for a while and turned, and probably not made friends.

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Ralph Loura: but by leaving, and I had a good friend of mine, Ramon Baez was had just left Kimberly Clark and become CEO CIO

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Ralph Loura: global CIO HP. And he called me and said, Hey, like I need your help. And so you know

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Ralph Loura: all my, you know, all my green flags went up. You need my help. I love, help, I love.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: I love to solve a problem.

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Ralph Loura: So I went over and became

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Ralph Loura: CIO of the Enterprise Group. What is now Hpe.

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Ralph Loura: And and

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Ralph Loura: you know, 3 months in, you know we get this announcement from Meg that we were separating the company in 3 pieces.

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Ralph Loura: so which was not what I signed up for, but became another interesting journey.

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Ralph Loura: And one that you know.

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Ralph Loura: Hold on all a lot of the things from the past, and and learn some new new skills and new attributes, and

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Ralph Loura: and was an interesting journey.

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Ralph Loura: Very different than what I've done before, but one I really enjoyed.

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Ralph Loura: and then

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Ralph Loura: but but again 1 1 that was

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Ralph Loura: fairly clear to me for a bunch of reasons wasn't where I wanted to stay long term, because again, HP. While innovative and so on, is a very large company, with a very

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Ralph Loura: large history and a lot of momentum behind a number of products and processes. And so I was here at the right time when they needed a catalytic change, and they needed dramatic change. Had I stuck around I would have been unhappy, and they would have been unhappy because they needed to move to the digesting the change part after the separate. So I left like the day after we separated, left Hpe

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Ralph Loura: and and it was, and I have great friends there that I ton of respect for Antonio CEO. There, now I work for Antonio for a long time. Fabulous leader! Love what they're doing. But

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Ralph Loura: but yeah, it was time for me to go.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Going back to when you were saying, you know you were on the trip to India, and he's like you got to slow down. Everyone had this change, fatigue at that point. What we're hearing, especially in the last 4 years, is that, like everyone, has change, fatigue now, like the speed of change and all of that stuff. And I'm just wondering, like, if you have advice for catalyst leaders

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: about how to cause even we're hearing. The catalyst leaders themselves are like having struggle, managing energy with the hey. We need to keep the lights on, get back to basics and fundamentals. But we can't slow down on transformation because we'll be dead in the water. Do you have advice.

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Ralph Loura: yeah,

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Ralph Loura: it's interesting. There's a

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Ralph Loura: There's a quote that I actually used last week at a conference here at to kind of make a point. There's a quote from I think computer week or Idg, and it was something like, you know, the Never before. You know the changing role of the CIO. It's changing faster. And it's different. And it's never been for like this. It's the best time in the world to be a CIO. And things are amazing. And it was a quote from 2,008,

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Ralph Loura: and it could have been from 1998, and it probably had another quote in 2018, there'll be another one in 2028. So, like the changing role of the CIO has been

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Ralph Loura: like a theme, my whole career and it's certainly not.

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Ralph Loura: I'm it's not getting. It's not getting different. It's just getting more right. So a decade ago, we weren't necessarily tasked with cyber all of a sudden every CIO's

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Ralph Loura: wakes up and eats, sleeps, and breathes fiber.

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Ralph Loura: you know. 5 years ago nobody heard of AI. Now AI is the core of every conversation.

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Ralph Loura: 2, 3 days ago, Shanghang University just published a paper that they for the 1st time were able to prove, and they published in a Peer review paper that they were able to decrypt.

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Ralph Loura: A rsa encrypted, you know, block of.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Wow!

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Ralph Loura: With using using quantum computing.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah. I didn't heard that.

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Ralph Loura: They did it in hours instead of, you know, years. So now they did it on a 22 bit encode encrypted. Now, most people using 2, 56, or 5 12. But basically it means a clock is ticking. Now that everything you've ever assumed was good about encryption is no longer good, so it's no longer quantum safe

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Ralph Loura: and quantum soap. Now, all of the cios have to worry about

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Ralph Loura: so, and there'll be something else. There'll be something next year.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: But to your point. This isn't like we've been talking about this. I remember being at Ces talking to the Ibm guy. I don't know how many years about quantum. But it's like the the pace of those things being realized. So yeah, so so advice for for.

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Ralph Loura: Next.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: And navigate that.

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Ralph Loura: So, you know.

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Ralph Loura: get comfortable, being uncomfortable. And yeah, I mean, so there's this. I mean, clearly, there's a balance right? You have to

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Ralph Loura: You have to make progress on

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Ralph Loura: strategic initiatives. You have to make. You know there's table stakes, right? You have to balance managing current operations

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Ralph Loura: with pilot piloting new opportunities.

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Ralph Loura: I I hate what gartner came out with like a decade ago. They talked about

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Ralph Loura: Bimodal. It

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Ralph Loura: I don't know if you remember Bimodal, it, and I and I used, and I again. This is because my my nature I used to joke. I said, Oh, it's it fast and slow. Who wants to be on the slow team

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Ralph Loura: like, you know?

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Ralph Loura: Nobody like I want Bimodal it, hey? There's gonna be the people that run the boring stuff. And then we're gonna have some cool people to go do fun stuff in the front.

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Ralph Loura: What team do you want to be on?

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Ralph Loura: So so I always looked at it as

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Ralph Loura: You have to be an advocate

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Ralph Loura: for new technologies and partnerships.

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Ralph Loura: but part of what the role of a leader or CIO is, is understanding

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Ralph Loura: the difference between the shiny objects from trim or change for change shakes and

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Ralph Loura: creating value. So, for instance, one of the reasons, 13 years ago, myself and some other really fabulous leaders, 8 cios at the time, Don doit bong tram, Rebecca Jacoby, Tony Scott. There was a bunch of us who got together and created the Tbm Council, the Technology Business Management Council

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Ralph Loura: of Tbm council.org. It's still around. It's got thousands of customers involved. Now, tens of thousands of people participating.

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Ralph Loura: And it's kind of became its own movement and the focus. There was basically taking technology organizations with technology spend and trying to align it to strategy and value

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Ralph Loura: frankly, way harder to do than it should be.

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Ralph Loura: A lot of people know what their costs are not a lot of people can tie that to value generation or to strategy

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Ralph Loura: and and so we spent a lot of time sharing with each other, helping build a a reference framework and a model. We published a book and certifications, and like we created kind of a whole movement around Tbm.

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Ralph Loura: But again, the idea was to help

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Ralph Loura: people figure out the difference, like where to invest, how to invest and what technology to be running it. So I would argue. AI, for instance, right now, most AI

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Ralph Loura: initiatives are based on a Fomo strategy.

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Ralph Loura: If I don't do AI, I'm an idiot like I'm gonna look at.

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Ralph Loura: Or like. So I have a fear of missing out.

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Ralph Loura: I'm gonna do AI, because I need to.

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Ralph Loura: But there's not a lot of thoughtful strategy behind some of what's being done? I I was

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Ralph Loura: so I was in in the Broadmoor, in the Ci. 100 conference in August.

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Ralph Loura: and I usually got up and did this great keynote talk about, hey? We surveyed everybody and what they're doing with AI. And here's our great results. It's fabulous, like you guys are working on some amazing things

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Ralph Loura: onboarding

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Ralph Loura: office productivity accounts, payable accounts receivable. You know. Hr, like

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Ralph Loura: this is like, the biggest nothing Burger ever we're working on, like

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Ralph Loura: like productivity. Really, that's the best we could do. We've got this amazing new thing. And the best thing we do is like what we've been doing for 15 years of Rpa and and Bpo, and like we couldn't find a better use case.

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Ralph Loura: So I'm I'm like, Come on, guys like we gotta figure this out?

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Ralph Loura: So so you've got to figure out, how does that connect to strategy and value? If your strategy is, do it 4% cheaper that you're doing a great job. But, by the way, unfortunately, maybe you save 4% in productivity. But you spent a ton on your AI projects. You're probably underwater in your roi value.

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Ralph Loura: So you've got you gotta find ways to to map

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Ralph Loura: technology, spend and organizational structure to strategy values.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): Amazing Advice.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Strategy, create value, love it.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): Amazing advice. All right, as we wrap up. I have 2 quick questions.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): One is following the thread of the conversation. So if someone out. There is having a Goldman Cisco moment.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): We know they need to go to the right place at the right time.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): How do they know which is the right place at the right time. What do they tune into? Ralph.

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Ralph Loura: So

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Ralph Loura: so so like I said, one is, you know, if something's making you uncomfortable.

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Ralph Loura: that's probably a good sign that you know, it's gonna you're gonna it's gonna cause you to grow. It's gonna cause you to change. It's gonna teach you something.

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Ralph Loura: And if you feel like, Oh, I've got this like I've got this job. Now I'm a great candidate. I could do this like in my sleep

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Ralph Loura: then, unless you want to be asleep for the next job. That's not the job.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): Mic drop. All right. Final question for us today. One of our favorites. We'd love to hear about your favorite catalyst Pastor Present.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): who inspires you.

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Ralph Loura: So

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Ralph Loura: there are so many of them. I will. I will say

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Ralph Loura: I'll give you may maybe 2 people. So one

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Ralph Loura: so, Pete Solvik I mentioned earlier. Pete was a CIO at Cisco.

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Ralph Loura: and Pete was just a really unique guy.

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Ralph Loura: He was very thoughtful. He was very in Silicon Valley, which is not known for its.

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Ralph Loura: you know, kind of emotional quotient sometimes.

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Ralph Loura: Pete was just he. He was. He was. He cared about people and what they were doing. He was.

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Ralph Loura: You know the old like People don't care what you know until they know that you care.

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Ralph Loura: and

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Ralph Loura: he was never easy to work for.

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Ralph Loura: but he was so cause he he like it, was like, Give you hard work, and you had to do it, and it was tough.

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Ralph Loura: but he was always there when it was tough to make help. You make the right decision, help you get to the right place.

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Ralph Loura: And he's still a mentor today and a friend he went on, to become a Vc. And has invested in companies like docusign and others, and very well as a as a technology leader and and investor and he's just you know. So Cisco, for instance.

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Ralph Loura: one of the 1st things he did when I was there is Cisco had a big it spend, and all the standard tension between. You know the the business who claim like. I don't get enough attention from it. And the Cfo said it cost too much and so Pete took a really bold move as a catalyst and said, Listen, here's here's what I'm gonna do, and I don't remember but it was big. It was like the it spend was like 2 billion dollars or something at the time.

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Ralph Loura: And he said, Listen, I'm gonna get. I'm gonna keep a billion to run the network. And the P, you know, desktop and help desk and the Erp systems and all that. And I can take the other 1 million dollars and give it back to business.

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Ralph Loura: So I'm gonna take sales and give them their chunk of the business, and Hr. And then you get to make a choice. Do you want to invest in a Crm platform, or do you want to hire another salesperson

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Ralph Loura: you pick?

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Ralph Loura: And it changed the conversation right now. It wasn't

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Ralph Loura: hanging up on it. It was wait a minute. No, no like kind of like don't do that.

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Ralph Loura: And then, in fact, John Chambers, because of that.

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Ralph Loura: they were. They were trying to get what they called I Internet quotient. They coin this term IQ. And they were trying to get people to be more of an E business.

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Ralph Loura: and he asked every leader to come in and present their IQ strategy, and the 1st 2 leaders came in and had their it. Leader. Present the strategy, and John's like. No, no, no, no.

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Ralph Loura: that's not allowed like I want you to claim the strategy, because it's your strategy, not theirs.

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Ralph Loura: So the I had to go back and kind of retool and come back. And it really changed the way they approach technology. And it was kind of fundamental.

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Ralph Loura: And then and then the other leader.

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Ralph Loura: again. I I was a customer and then became a he became a mentor, and a friend is Tom Mendoza, who was, you know, for a while was originally sales.

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Ralph Loura: then then CEO, and later chairman of the board at Netapp.

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Ralph Loura: and

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Ralph Loura: Tom Tom tells a story about when he was 1st hired into Netapp in sales

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Ralph Loura: and the set the

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Ralph Loura: went to a board meeting. One of the board met, and he and he struggled like they didn't make their number. They were way behind. And he's thinking I'm gonna get my butt kicked. And he was preparing for a really rough day.

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Ralph Loura: and he walked in, and, like the the

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Ralph Loura: one of the board members, pulled him aside and said, Hey, man, hang in there! You're doing great. We got your back like this is tough, but like we get it. And he walked out, thinking that was a lot easier than I thought, and I got all the support, and so then they went out. Next year they killed it. There were 2 X sales. Everything was going great. They had great product and market good product market fit.

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Ralph Loura: and he goes to the board meeting and think, man, if they, you know, love me last time they're gonna like

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Ralph Loura: it really love me this time.

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Ralph Loura: and he said he spent like 10 h in what felt like the longest root canal of his life.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): Oh, God!

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Ralph Loura: And he's like, and then he goes to the same board member. He goes dude like what happened like, why are you so mad? He goes. I'm not mad, he goes. Why did you like? Why did you? Just what what happened? He goes. Well, the 1st time you came in here

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Ralph Loura: you were having a tough time

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Ralph Loura: you were. You didn't have confidence and belief in yourself. You needed

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Ralph Loura: belief and support and someone to help spur you on, because this time you came in you were cocky. You thought you own the world. And I said, and you've got a bunch of competitors who aren't gonna let that happen for long, and they're coming for you. So I need to tune you up. Man.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): Write lessons.

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Ralph Loura: And I was like what a great lesson.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): Oh, my gosh, amazing! You are the best storyteller! Ralph.

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Ralph Loura: Well, and and one of the so closing the last thing.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): Yeah.

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Ralph Loura: Great piece of advice Tom gave me

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Ralph Loura: because I was

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Ralph Loura: doing a keynote speech speech for an event.

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Ralph Loura: and I said, Tom, you're like one of the best speakers I know like, How do you prepare for a talk?

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Ralph Loura: And he said, Oh, well, I don't like. I don't review the material like, you know, because usually, if they have me up there, I'm not walking through the 12 bullets. And you know this, the training material, like they have somebody else doing that stuff.

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Ralph Loura: he said. I'm not like focused on that, he said. I just have one question when I go on before I go on stage. What's that? He goes? How do you want them to feel when they leave?

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Ralph Loura: So it's like, you know, like a sales meeting. Do you want them to feel like.

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Ralph Loura: Oh, my God, we're gonna get a butt kick. We gotta get out there. We gotta get working. Do you want them to feel like, hey? Pick your head up! You're doing great like you've got this. Do you want like? How do you want them to feel when they leave? And he goes. That's my whole focus.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): How I want people to feel today is inspired, and you have landed that plane amazingly, Ralph. Thank you so much for the time with us for sharing your stories and wisdom.

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Ralph Loura: Oh, it's been! It's been a blast. Thanks a lot.

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Tracey Lovejoy (she, her): And thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to learn more about how to create powerful and bold change in the world, please be sure to check out our book, move fast, break ship, burnout, or go to our website at catalystconstellations.com.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: And if you've enjoyed this episode and this conversation with Ralph as much as we have, please take 10 seconds to rate it on Itunes spotify stitcher, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Of course, if you have other catalysts in your life, hit the share button and send a link their way thanks again.