Sandeep Mehta, former Chief Technology Officer at The Hartford: Transformation Secret Sauce: Purpose, Sponsorship, and Engagement

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

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: This is our podcast move, fast, break ship burnout, where we speak with catalyst executives about ways to successfully lead transformation and large organizations. Today, I'm super excited to have with me Sandeep, Mehta Sandeep! Welcome.

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Sandeep Mehta: Thank you, Shannon. Great to be here.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Sandeep has an incredible career. Until recently he was the chief technology officer at the Hartford Financial Services group in my hometown of Hartford, Connecticut. Prior to the Hartford. He was Executive Vice President and CIO and technology at Wells, Fargo, and before that he was at Ubs, where he was managing director based in Zurich and Switzerland and Hong Kong, a true global native.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Earlier in his career Sandeep held technology roles at various banks in telecom and consumer electronics. His background in technology includes software development in artificial intelligence, robotics, imaging and speech recognition. While at companies like Verizon, Philips and the University of Rochester, his work in AI has resulted in a patent for autonomous vehicle navigation, and he was part of the product team at Ny. Next. Now, Verizon.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: that launched the 1st consumer AI product voice dialing for the telecom network. He's an Advisory Board member for the Ethical AI Governance group and Samba Nova systems. He's passionate about how AI is going to transform the world, and I can't wait to hear more about it.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Alright. So that's that's the official bio. But as I mentioned, I'd love to hear from in your words about your catalytic journey, and maybe any career highlights that you can share, that you're proud of, that help us see your catalytic nature.

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Sandeep Mehta: Sure, thanks for the wonderful intro. By the way, so I'll kind of try to weave the story and connect to the 3 main lessons if you want to put it that way that I've learned along my my journey. So I began my career in the last AI boom, working on self parking vehicles and voice recognition as you mentioned what was clear to me, that even then working as an engineer, that if you don't understand

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Sandeep Mehta: the what, why, for whom and how much of a product or a set of products? Innovation on its own, regardless of technical challenges, is not

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Sandeep Mehta: always going to work. It doesn't mean that you won't innovate, but you won't convert that innovation to successful products. So the 1st lesson I would say in my 1st couple of jobs was about purpose.

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Sandeep Mehta: You know, having a very clear sense of purpose in the organization, and as individual contributors to that effort.

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Sandeep Mehta: So

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Sandeep Mehta: in the early nineties. Of course, AI, 1.0 or 2.0, you can say, went through a change. And I pivoted to financial services just as the web and Internet were born

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Sandeep Mehta: and working on like the 1st chat application, the 1st web platform for large global banks.

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Sandeep Mehta: I constantly kept running into the debate that was build versus buy. And now, of course, that's pretty normal. But in the early days the bill versus buy debate was quite passionate, because most banks were building things from scratch custom, software custom platforms. It was very important to get into that debate. I know it's somewhat orthogonal to innovation, but the question was making sure that you have the sponsorship, the second big lessons

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Sandeep Mehta: to make sure they can pay for the innovation, and they sponsor it in terms of building it, and then, seeing it successfully deployed and scaled out, is very, very important. The sponsoring, both in terms of the money and in terms of the support, the organization and the team needs.

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Sandeep Mehta: And then over the last 20 years, I would say, I've been involved in various large transformations at banks around the world, and I would say, the 3rd big lesson, seeing these transformation

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Sandeep Mehta: in all kinds of operating models in large companies, medium sized companies, mostly in finance.

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Sandeep Mehta: I find repeatedly that the humans are kind of an afterthought in those large transformations, you know. So so they get get left behind in the big journey.

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Sandeep Mehta: But you can't treat people like rubber balls. They bounce back every time like the rest of the work keeps bouncing back. They're not as elastic and resilient as rubber balls, so identifying what types of change people can embrace and can champion and make sure that they are part of that journey

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Sandeep Mehta: is super important, most often more often than not the best ideas, Shannon, come from within. And so if you take, I'll take an example. You know, overall automation. If you go back 20 years there have been many evolutions of automation pre web, post web. And now, with the advent of AI,

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Sandeep Mehta: if you don't take a humane approach to humans in the loop. Then you inevitably have

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Sandeep Mehta: processes that are critical and regulated companies like banks that will work 80% of the time and then have challenges 20% of the time. But when things go wrong that 20% edge case

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Sandeep Mehta: has to be handled by so-called humans in the loop. And I think that it's very, very important to take a humane approach to humans in the loop with regards to automation, especially with large companies and and transformation.

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Sandeep Mehta: So I'd say, through my, you know, 25 plus year career journey.

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Sandeep Mehta: These 3 kind of tenants have been very important to me as a catalyst

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Sandeep Mehta: amazing. I'm going to come back to these? I'll go to the next question. Then I'll come back. So in your own words. How do you relate to the concept of catalyst then.

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Sandeep Mehta: Oh, so you know.

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Sandeep Mehta: I like the fact. The book puts it so simply. It's very like readable. I zip through the 1st part of the book really fast, so that triumvirate vision, action and iteration. I like that. But you know

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Sandeep Mehta: more than that like, how do you relate as a catalyst? So I saw, like the attributes. You know, they are constantly

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Sandeep Mehta: ingesting data. I mean, humans are ingesting data and analyzing and processing that data

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Sandeep Mehta: doing a what if in their head, what is this about? How can it be applied?

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Sandeep Mehta: You can call it can you know, dreaming, imagining you know things that large language models can't do, they can't dream in them.

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Sandeep Mehta: So you, you need humans to innovate in that aspect of of creativity.

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Sandeep Mehta: But also, you know, in that experimentation mode, having a desire to act all the time, to experiment, to tinker around, but knowing that tinkering will not work 90% of the time dealing with that risk dealing with the kind of

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Sandeep Mehta: vagueness of the problem. You know you, you take 2 steps forward, you take one step backward and it sometimes it takes years.

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Sandeep Mehta: but as long as you have that strong belief that you have the right idea, and make sure that there are like-minded people and hopefully executives who will sponsor it. I think catalyst can be effective.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: So much wisdom to unpack. So I would love to go back to your 3 key takeaways from your journey. The purpose of the transformation or the innovation. I'm wondering how you get clarity on that. Is that your own personal purpose? Are you aligning to the organization like what are steps that you do to get clear on purpose.

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Sandeep Mehta: How how about? I say that it's important to know what not to do.

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Sandeep Mehta: So tackling a very big problem

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Sandeep Mehta: is hard to completely articulate and ideate and get support for, and sponsor sponsorship for, so I would say, take a small problem, but perfect it

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Sandeep Mehta: and use that or multiple small problems, because ultimately, you know.

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Sandeep Mehta: the kind of snowball effect will kick in or the flywheel effect will kick in so perfecting a solution to a small problem is very, very important before you tackle huge problems, because it also demonstrates your success. It builds trust trust amongst organization, because we are still made of people is super important. I also would say that

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Sandeep Mehta: inevitably, in the innovation journey you're going to partner with people.

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Sandeep Mehta: So 2 things there. 1st of all.

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Sandeep Mehta: the journey is going to be long. So measurement is important. But.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah.

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Sandeep Mehta: Confused

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Sandeep Mehta: are we measuring what matters or making what we measure matter? And that latter may not be true? So it's super important to really focus on measure. What matters.

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Sandeep Mehta: So that's 1 thing. The second part is

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Sandeep Mehta: with new technology innovation. It's very easy to get advocates who say, yes, but it's important to focus on people who write checks

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Sandeep Mehta: having customers, internal or external. Say, I believe in this. Yes, and I will support it

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Sandeep Mehta: by sponsoring it financially and otherwise adopting the solution is better than saying Yes, and I'll do a Poc, and then it'll wither on the wine. So I think that's very important to make that distinction, and make sure that

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Sandeep Mehta: you can align yourselves to people who are willing to write checks for your innovation and inventions.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: It's such an important step in the process. And I sort of have 2 questions around that.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: One is, I mean, maybe it's actually just one question which is like, you can't bring those people in too early because they won't know what they're sponsoring. But if you bring them in too late. You've you've lost the guidance, the the other forms of support. I'm wondering how you know, like when to engage the person to write the to write the check, and how you know what the needle is for them. That's gonna get them on board.

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Sandeep Mehta: I think

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Sandeep Mehta: so. So. You know it's a i was surprised to find out that the innovators dilemma goes back to the seventies in terms of the original concepts.

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Sandeep Mehta: it happens to repeat itself so often. It's super important for

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Sandeep Mehta: companies not to focus on the most lucrative end

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Sandeep Mehta: of like the incumbent customer incumbent products. But say, you know, what is the

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Sandeep Mehta: mass consumer want? And how can this new technology emerging address that mass market? And inevitably, technology goes through iterations and of improvement and eventually takes over. That's true. If you look at, you know, one of my

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Sandeep Mehta: catalyst role, model, if you want to put it that way, is Reed Hastings. He was a maths teacher, then a software developer and created pure software which I used avidly in my coding days, and then.

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Sandeep Mehta: with the whole DVD. Experience.

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Sandeep Mehta: I remember hearing an interview where he said, You know, we kind of did the math

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Sandeep Mehta: on what the modems of the nineties would take to deliver a whole DVD worth of a movie to your home.

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Sandeep Mehta: It would take

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Sandeep Mehta: 5 h per gigabyte, and the average movie is a couple of gigabytes. So you can imagine saying, Okay, well, if that's the case, then a DVD through Usps is going to get there faster, and they perfected that DVD delivery system. But it was

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Sandeep Mehta: having that prescience to say, we want to get to this end goal. But today only this is possible. So let's perfect what's possible in a small way. And as a very early Netflix customer, I love that service, even though it depended on the mail service.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: You hit on something fascinating which is

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: in sometimes when there's disruptive things that we're pitching to organizations, there are metrics that we can look at, even if we don't know how much people will pay for the new service. For example, there's a metric that we can say, well, they're not going to do this sometimes, though it's a whole new like market that you're opening up. The Mckinsey report isn't written. And so I'm curious, like again, going back to like you need the sponsor who's going to give you the funding?

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: How do you navigate, or how get them on board in that gray area where it's just like we don't know how much people will pay for the DVD thing, because it's not blockbuster. And it's not that.

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Sandeep Mehta: Yes, exactly. And that's so. So I'd kind of partition

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Sandeep Mehta: markets and products into 2 categories, enterprise and consumer, I'd say, for enterprise, you know there's a kind of half art, half science to

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Sandeep Mehta: pricing your product and service. You can't be. Make it consumer grade cheap.

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Sandeep Mehta: because people will naturally disbelieve over this can't be any good for the enterprise, because it's so affordable. Now that's changed recently with Saas services. But you can't make it so expensive that only fortune 100 companies can afford it.

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Sandeep Mehta: Zoomer end.

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Sandeep Mehta: It's very important to like. It's kind of the principle of capitalism. You charge people as much as they're willing to bear and and be willing to change that policy very quickly.

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Sandeep Mehta: Lot of companies have tried this premium model, but they they don't

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Sandeep Mehta: have that inflection point that they say, Okay, the premium model doesn't work. We've got to start charging customers from the 1st day onwards.

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Sandeep Mehta: Digital publishing with newspapers is an interesting example. Some companies believe in the freemium model.

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Sandeep Mehta: Some companies will paywall their content right away.

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Sandeep Mehta: and then ultimately they have to do a trial and error with consumers. And mostly it's error to say, how much is our content worth and constantly be doing

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Sandeep Mehta: price tuning discounts experiments in the market.

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Sandeep Mehta: when they, until they discover the sweet spot. But so far in digital publishing the.

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Sandeep Mehta: And this is true of digital streaming as well. It's a kind of Barbell shape, you know. You have a large number of consumers going for the pure free model and a smaller end of the barbell that are willing to pay the premium price.

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Sandeep Mehta: And unfortunately, it's not great for artists, content creators, writers, publishers, because at the Barbell they can't

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Sandeep Mehta: generate enough revenue at the premium end, and they still need the the mass consumer support in case that there's a turnover rate that they can convert some of these people. So it's a

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Sandeep Mehta: experimentation. They all. I think

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Sandeep Mehta: we've had 20 years of digital media and publishing and streaming, and we are still experimenting.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah, I think that's a really interesting insight which is like. And it does go back to the sort of vision action, iteration thing of the catalyst, too, which is like you have a hypothesis. You try it out. You get the data. You have to understand your context. 1st and foremost, like, am I an enterprise, or am I in consumer and getting more granular on that? And then just the data and the constant willingness to to reevaluate?

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Okay, I I also want to go to the 3rd one that you talked about because you said, you know, humans can't be an afterthought. And if you look at like the normal distribution of change right from the catalyst innovators to the laggards, etc. There's a huge like, you know, there's huge range there with the employees who are probably in your organization.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: And there's we talk a lot about the emotional labor that catalysts have in terms of bringing the organization along on the change. I'm wondering if you have any advice about how to like leverage your energy super strategically, so that you're bringing the humans along, but not burning yourself out in the process.

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Sandeep Mehta: That that's a challenge. Because, you know, it's

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Sandeep Mehta: especially when you kind of have an executive hat on.

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Sandeep Mehta: You are spending a lot of time in your day making

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Sandeep Mehta: high impact decisions. But they are usually on the kind of finance side of the administrative side of the Hr. Side, and it's super important to

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Sandeep Mehta: carve out time

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Sandeep Mehta: for yourself to say, you know. How do I rejuvenate, refresh? You know, if you have a curious mind, how am I getting, you know, constant new data. So being curious, learning all the time, having mentors that can give you look outward for those mentors

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Sandeep Mehta: to give you affirmation, because it's very difficult to look inwards. And people find people who affirm your thoughts, your ideas, your efforts. They're rarely going to be able to do that because everyone's working on a short horizon.

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Sandeep Mehta: I think it's hard to say that happiness and truth and beauty

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Sandeep Mehta: are essential to technology. So you know. It reminds me of a

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Sandeep Mehta: book in 1932. You probably know it. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. So the the dilemma is, you know, in that Utopian world of technology.

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Sandeep Mehta: I think quote goes something like, we don't want to change because every change is a menace to stability. But today's stability is tomorrow's misery for a lot of people. So I think it's important to

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Sandeep Mehta: acknowledge the fact that the people will naturally be wary, but be very open.

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Sandeep Mehta: non defensive to getting the feedback getting the challenge. It's a kind of

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Sandeep Mehta: way off field example. But return to work post Covid.

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Sandeep Mehta: and in my last job I was heading the committee that was supposed to implement return to work.

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Sandeep Mehta: It was

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Sandeep Mehta: the easy part was getting the logistics worked out, getting the technology worked out, getting the Hr process worked out, getting the data, gathering and reporting worked out for executives. But the messaging and socializing was super hard, because, no matter what we tried, we were not allowed to use a word mandate.

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Sandeep Mehta: We had to take significant feedback, basically calling us hypocrites. Because, I said, you know, people have been working this way, some in some cases for a decade and highly productive. So why? Why does coming driving 30 miles into the office make it

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Sandeep Mehta: make it better for us.

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Sandeep Mehta: and we did not have enough credible examples to bring to bring them on board and earn their trust. So people.

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Sandeep Mehta: even though we didn't say mandate.

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Sandeep Mehta: we effectively signal to them that this is a mandate, and you gotta do it. And people did it. But they were very grudging about it. So

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Sandeep Mehta: is an important lesson to acknowledge that

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Sandeep Mehta: you will be met with skepticism. You will be met with resistance if you take a hard line towards skepticism and resistance.

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Sandeep Mehta: You will probably lose a lot of people, but, on the other hand, you cannot have a perpetual debate, and accommodate all the skepticism and resistance.

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Sandeep Mehta: I kind of rule use a rule of 3rd channel. So in any change, organizational transformational innovation led change.

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Sandeep Mehta: The rule of thirds is a 3rd of the people will see it, get it, run towards that, embrace it.

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Sandeep Mehta: A 3rd of the people will see it.

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Sandeep Mehta: maybe skeptical, but they said, I'll embrace it if you help me.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Hmm.

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Sandeep Mehta: Give me the support, the training, the learning, and be empathetic.

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Sandeep Mehta: And 3rd of the people absolutely won't get it or don't want to get it, and and you have to accommodate those people in a humane manner. So example I give is, you know, all these companies are now legacy. Organizations are transforming to the cloud.

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Sandeep Mehta: And so they'll put a whole

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Sandeep Mehta: program management structure. But then they will also create a training program for everyone.

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Sandeep Mehta: It's really important to say, yeah.

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Sandeep Mehta: it's it's a training program, but it's optional.

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Sandeep Mehta: It's not a mandate where I see a mandate. I get howls of protest coming from my former staff. It said, You know, hey, Sandeep? I've been programming in Cobol for decades, and I'm going to retire in 5 years. Why do I have to become an Aws engineer.

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Sandeep Mehta: You have to have those exceptions handled humanely because people don't necessarily

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Sandeep Mehta: want to or believe in that change

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Sandeep Mehta: as it's not relevant to them, or will not be relevant to them eventually.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: It's so interesting because we increasingly have this conversation with organizations. Again, if I go back to sort of the normal distribution of of Change curve you may be you may have historically been at one place, like, if you're heavily regulated industry on the like market wide spectrum. It may be, you know, further down than a tech company as an example.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: But I think what we're seeing, especially since the pandemic, I mean, some of us have been talking about the Vuca reality for a really long time. Right? But it's like the the whole body of the organization is probably has to move more to the agility and be able to respond to change. But what I love and what you just said is, it's a yes, and because there's some people. It's like, look if they're a few years away from retiring like having the like. The one off perspectives, I think, is

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: is challenging as a leader and necessary to help bring the organization along.

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Sandeep Mehta: Okay? And and you know you.

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Sandeep Mehta: you always have to do it pretty publicly, you know, even when you're going against the grain and giving these people the exceptions, whether it's, you know, return to work, or, you know, getting Cloud certified after years of programming and cobol. It's important because

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Sandeep Mehta: more more news travels through the grapevine, especially if it's negative news. So I think, what's that thing about? You know good news is barely getting out of bed when bad news is traveled around the world.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah, a hundred percent. It's so interesting. And I, I want to go back and highlight, too. Because what you, as you started to answer this, follow up question about like, how do you bring people along? And the risk of burnout? You called out some really important things, and I love your clarity. You're like. This is what I need. I need to carve out time for myself. I need to make sure that I'm rejuvenating, but it's not just rejuvenating like for us, as catalysts like having time built in for the curious

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: of all of the different, you know, reports or sci-fi things, or whatever is is coming out, I think, is is super important. So I don't want to miss that super important point, because.

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Sandeep Mehta: No, it may vary by people, but for me, you know, cinema, theater, reading, music are all fueling that you know. What if? What about it can just be happy accidents that you realize just sitting somewhere completely

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Sandeep Mehta: disconnected from your day job, so to speak.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Catalyst happy hours on a rooftop in New York. As an example, the collisions happen.

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Sandeep Mehta: Okay.

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Sandeep Mehta: Yes, to that.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: 100. Maybe you answered some of these, but I'll ask it a different way. So what are some of the challenges that you had as a catalyst executive, maybe one or 2. And what most helped you overcoming those? We also invite stories of failure, because sometimes those are the biggest learnings. But what would you like to share there.

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Sandeep Mehta: I would say. You know.

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Sandeep Mehta: it goes back to the kind of 3 lessons through my career on purpose sponsors, and you know, humane humanity.

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Sandeep Mehta: I faced the latter 2 challenges.

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Sandeep Mehta: More than in more than one situation. So I think, as we talked about like maintaining your center and making sure that you kind of

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Sandeep Mehta: have the time to self-care, and quotes to being

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Sandeep Mehta: able to reach out to mentors who are like-minded looking outwards.

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Sandeep Mehta: it's very easy to kind of.

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Sandeep Mehta: It's a lot like entrepreneurs. They they take their startup pitch, you know, 10 times 20 times and hurt your 99% knows, but

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Sandeep Mehta: they either have a very strong belief.

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Sandeep Mehta: or they get affirmation of their ideas and and beliefs

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Sandeep Mehta: in the face of all that adversity from the outside, and that's super important.

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Sandeep Mehta: You know, or even if if you are

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Sandeep Mehta: there's a great quote from from Jamie Diamond after he lost his job at Citigroup, and he said,

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Sandeep Mehta: I lost my job so it may impact my net worth not my self-worth.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: That's an amazing one for catalyst. That's so important. It can be so hard. And because we can, even when we're

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: doing our best work and trying to be in service of organizations, we often can become the lightning rod of the resistance of change right? And so probably the number of people. The percentage of catalysts that let go, even like Jamie Diamond is higher in this population. But it's not a reflection of who we you know, are worth as people which I absolutely love.

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Sandeep Mehta: Another person who really kind of took that approach to

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Sandeep Mehta: realizing. Well, it's a bit different. I'm talking about Ed Catmull and the founding of Pixar, I mean. He came from Academia he was supposed to be in New York, but ended up getting pitched

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Sandeep Mehta: to to start a company called Pixar

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Sandeep Mehta: throughout his like. And this his book, Creativity is is a must read. I don't know if you read it.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Haven't. I'll add it to the list.

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Sandeep Mehta: Through throughout the book. He talks about his approach to empowering people because of for Pixar as a creative enterprise, how to embrace creativity, failure and trying to do it in a very candid manner. It's pretty unique

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Sandeep Mehta: compared to the norm in corporate management.

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Sandeep Mehta: In fact, at Pixar they call it the brainstrust. So

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Sandeep Mehta: you attack problems. You could have a script. You could have an animation not running well, especially before the current age of, you know, graphic supercomputers came about so frequently. You've got almost the entire script finished. And the movie, you know, rough cuts are done, and you've got to go back to the drawing board, and I think the Brains Trust

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Sandeep Mehta: was like this

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Sandeep Mehta: close, trusting environment where people could, you know, clash ideas, but not clash people or attack. People allowed the company to thrive, you know, through great periods of stress, and making sure the leadership allowed that to happen, that brainstrust a exist and be thrive in Matt in face of conflict, was super important to people. Feeling

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Sandeep Mehta: affirmed about their attempts, their efforts, failures, and successes.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: It's so important, and it's so important for catalysts. And I get. I'm so guilty of doing this, but I often conflate the idea or the thing that I'm trying to birth in the world with myself or my self worth.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: and I think we almost have an Obligation to the rest of our team to distance ourselves and be like here. And you talked about curiosity like, Hey, I'm okay. If you want to tear this apart or tear it down to the ground, or whatever. I'm offering this in service, based on the scanning that I've done. I think we can help co-create those environments like the brain trust that you're talking about. So it's not the personal personal piece I love that.

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Sandeep Mehta: I you know I was. I was writing my my thoughts out, and I remembered, you know.

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Sandeep Mehta: a funny question I got asked when I finished my my master's degree, I finished my. I had not yet defended, but I finished all the the work, and

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Sandeep Mehta: my roommate or a friend asked me like, you know, what would you differently? And I said, Throw this whole thing away, and redo it.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Exactly.

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Sandeep Mehta: The effort of the 6, 8, 9 months

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Sandeep Mehta: was enough. Learning to realize that if you did, it got a second chance at a do-over, you do it completely, differently.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah. And that's so good. Because we we as a community can get arrogant about our ideas sometimes. And I think it's important to be like. Actually, if I'm honest with myself, I would have done XY or Z differently.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: I also want to come back because I forgot to mention you had said in your thing about like the maintaining your center and the you know, and your energy mentors, which I think is super important and sort of building off of that. It's, you know, getting the affirmation from the outside. And I think that's such an interesting sort of call to action to like, you know, when I was leading innovation at Vodafone, I would

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: I I it would be like I might have an idea, but it was like 10 customer workshops with the C-suite, where I could say, this isn't Shannon's idea. This is the C-suite of the Top 10 Company customers that you're going after, and it's such an important reminder. For for us, too, like cause we can drink our own Kool-aid right.

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Sandeep Mehta: Most companies, you know, public company. Maybe this is a kind of finance industry specific. They think that.

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Sandeep Mehta: you know for and and technical

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Sandeep Mehta: technical people are creative that giving them, you know. Here's the once a year trip to Vegas. To go to aws, reinvent or oracle world is sufficient, because people, you know, want a kind of a quote, unquote party, and and, you know, get swag and all that. They completely miss the boat. The affirmation you get from being on, you know podcasts like yours. Events like the one in New York City. Our dinner, where you said catalysts are

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Sandeep Mehta: people who bite their tongue for a living.

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Sandeep Mehta: I love that I absolutely love that it these opportunities to meet like-minded people and hear their stories and say, Aha! So I'm not alone.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yes.

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Sandeep Mehta: Affirming. It's super important.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Such. Thank you for reframing that it's so important. And we know when catalysts are in community, the frictionless of it can just be so liberating like I don't have to bite my tongue. In fact, people are encouraging me to think bigger and bolder, and act faster. And all of this stuff, which is why I love my job. There's a theme that we've been hearing in the last year about companies being asked to do more with less.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: And I'm curious about if you have thoughts about this with the intersection of AI, because I know you're super passionate about AI. You're on the you know the ethical governance.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: How do you see those 2 intersecting and playing out.

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Sandeep Mehta: So so there's

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Sandeep Mehta: I. I think the full story has not been written yet. There's a lot of hype like any technology, you know curve.

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Sandeep Mehta: I think the real challenge lies in. 1st of all, you know.

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Sandeep Mehta: technology goes at either extremes, and you have, you know, one extreme complete advocates and supporters, and then complete skeptics. And in between lies the truth. And so the skeptics are going to point out every failure of language models and algorithms, systems and hallucinating, etc, etc. And and the the supporters will say, Agi is coming tomorrow, but

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Sandeep Mehta: in the middle there is a whole host of things that we can do that and are doing, I think, for the most part, that address everyday problems for people and companies, that

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Sandeep Mehta: it.

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Sandeep Mehta: It's sometimes more than good enough for a solution. So I think that's where we should focus

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Sandeep Mehta: while I'm a strong believer in in regulation. And, in fact, I would say, work with your your Regulators, because

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Sandeep Mehta: they're going to be your friend in the end. I see the whole debate with crypto, like, you know, download the Regulators, etc. It's gotten politicized. But the reality is they're going to be your friend, and it's important to understand, speak their language, to understand their concerns. This is equally true in AI

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Sandeep Mehta: especially with things like AI and healthcare AI, and in the military AI and medicine, and sorry in transportation, etc. So it comes back to that.

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Sandeep Mehta: How do you incorporate the human AI hybrid model in the environment? Because

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Sandeep Mehta: the the C-suite in most companies right now is not looking at through the lens of product of productivity and enhancement, they're looking

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Sandeep Mehta: it as, yeah, your productivity is improved by 20%. So now cut your budget by 20%. So I was in the last 2 board meetings I was at. The theme was pretty clear, no matter what the industry domain budgets are flat. So if you're going to ask for more investment dollars, then you're going to have to find it within your own budget

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Sandeep Mehta: to fund those investment projects. So AI is going to have to be funded by whatever you're doing, you're going to reduce. So if you believe that AI is going to save developer productivity

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Sandeep Mehta: by 20%. So take down your labor costs for developers by 20%. Now, it's a it's a dangerous situation to to make that bet. Because what if it doesn't?

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Sandeep Mehta: And recent data says, you know that one end? You have Mckinsey 2530% productivity improvement. And the reality is coming out to be more like 6 to 8%. So

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Sandeep Mehta: can we kind of take the divide in the middle? Maybe maybe not. But inevitably, I've found organization leadership will always take the most bullish case that they hear from from Mckinsey and add another, you know. So it's super important to like.

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Sandeep Mehta: Be very careful as to, you know

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Sandeep Mehta: it's like Confucius. Be be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Totally. And I think it's such a great example of like it's a it's. It's a great stand in for almost any type of change. Because if you tell the developer community or anyone in the organization, yeah, we're gonna give you this tool. But like to your point in the background. Everyone knows that there's a rift coming, or some kind of like reduction of budget in other places. You've actually really rammed up the resistance for people who might have been the 1st big embracers. Otherwise.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Do you have advice for executives on how to help navigate that to to at least like think ahead of the resistance they might be increasing.

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Sandeep Mehta: I, I know, look! Executives are paid to have those tough conversations, but

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Sandeep Mehta: throughout my career I've believed in under promise and over deliver, and what I've seen time and again is over, promise under deliver. And so then

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Sandeep Mehta: you get burned. And then you say, Okay, here comes technology again, trying to sell us a new mousetrap. What's different this time?

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: I I love that. That's a personal motto of mine, too. Any final points of wisdom for our listeners.

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Sandeep Mehta: Oh, boy, I think it's again the customer focus.

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Sandeep Mehta: Expect technology to reinvent things. I like to tell stories and anecdotes. And I just read a case this morning about the CEO of Ford motor. By the way, Ford has been in China

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Sandeep Mehta: for over 2 decades, and China, with the central government support has been

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Sandeep Mehta: investing in electric vehicle technology for at least 15, maybe no 20 years. 20 years, plus

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Sandeep Mehta: the the consumer in China saw the

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Sandeep Mehta: cars are going to be a computer on wheels way before

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Sandeep Mehta: the rest of the world did so. As a result, I would say 6 out of 10 of the top electric car makers are from China, and they're

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Sandeep Mehta: growing. Market share is a Testament to how much consumers love their product. Now tariffs aside

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Sandeep Mehta: in the Uk. They're proving their their worth, too.

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Sandeep Mehta: In the Us. And Ford is a good example. The deliberate

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Sandeep Mehta: ignoring of the yeah. This is just a toy and focus on the high end. Luxury trucks was good.

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Sandeep Mehta: but classic innovators. Dilemma you keep, you know, feeding off the cash cow.

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Sandeep Mehta: and soon the cash cow is going to be gone. Kodak learned that Xerox learned that they're like shadow of their former selves. Kodak is truly a shadow, and I was from Rochester, New York. So Kodak and Xerox were big there, and they're a shadow of their original selves because they did exactly that. They kept focusing on, you know, film cameras and chemistry and photocopiers.

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Sandeep Mehta: and forgot that they did. I mean, who has a photocopy or not?

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: So what's your advice for for leaders to to navigate bringing in their own disruptive S curve? I mean, that's really what the innovators. Dilemma is about like, do you think that large organizations can do that? Or is the hypothesis that it has to start with some other relationship? As a you know, spin.

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Sandeep Mehta: They don't work.

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Sandeep Mehta: If they don't do it.

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Sandeep Mehta: it will be thrust on them by the market. I think it's important to do it. You can have a debate about. Should we do it organically from bottoms up in the organization? Should we do it, you know, either as a joint venture or as a special project separately protected from the enterprise, I would say

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Sandeep Mehta: the latter, but then you have to have a very deliberate.

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Sandeep Mehta: conscious effort on how you kind of stitch that into the DNA of the firm and not just like, say, Oh, we're gonna have change management. That's the most, you know.

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Sandeep Mehta: overused trope in in transformation. We're gonna have change management. But really what it is, it's, you know, doing road shows and all that stuff. But when the dust settles.

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Sandeep Mehta: people don't embrace it. So I think how that again human humane and human approach to

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Sandeep Mehta: making sure that the fabric of the organization does not have an immune response to the innovation when it's ready.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Sandeep. I could listen to you for hours. I really appreciate your your hard, won wisdom. I'm guessing

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: as a final question I'd love to understand or hear about your favorite catalyst, who inspires you, past or present, and why.

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Sandeep Mehta: I rattled off Reed Hastings and Ed Catmull particularly, because, you know, he was an academic researcher in computer graphics. And I don't know if you know this. But University of Utah in Salt Lake City was where all the pioneering work happened in computer graphics in the seventies and eighties.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: I did not know that that's fascinating.

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Sandeep Mehta: The fact that someone who's basically an academic researcher, engineer, pioneer, can pivot to being such a successful entrepreneur to such an iconic companies is is truly like inspiring.

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Sandeep Mehta: Reed Hastings, of course I mentioned that I could name lots of people whose book I will say this if you read the biography of like Tesla. He had some really wild ideas, and believe it or not. Besides Westinghouse

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Sandeep Mehta: he had one fan, and his fan was John Pierpoint Morgan.

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Sandeep Mehta: He got financing from Jp. Morgan over and over again because he got them to believe in his ideas, but eventually he ran out of cash and did not have product for for launching to the market. In the case of A/C, he had the support of Westinghouse, so we all now know that A/C power is is

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Sandeep Mehta: is the standard, not not what Edison and Ge wanted.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: It is fascinating as an example. Because you really, you know, compared with Edison, it's like you really have to. It's like the inspired genius plus the business acumen like coming back to the other stakeholders, the market, and all of that. To make sure that you're that you can, you can get that thing. There's a sustainable model to get that out. So thank you. I'm a i'm a big Tesla fan as well Sandeep. Thank you so much for your amazing storytelling and your wisdom. It's been an absolute.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: And to our listeners thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to learn more about how to create bold, powerful change in the world. Be sure to check out our book, move fast, break, shit, burn out, or go to our website at catalystconstellations.com. If you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did, and I'm pretty sure you did. Please take 10 seconds to rate it on itunes, spotify stitcher, or wherever you listen to your podcasts and of course. If you have other catalysts in your life, the share button and send a link their way. Thanks again.

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Sandeep Mehta: Thank you.