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The Digital Executive
Beyond the Code: Michel Langlois on Human-Centric Leadership and the Future of Tech | Ep 1070
00:20:21
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Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Michel Langlois. Michel Langlois is a distinguished senior executive with an impressive 30 plus year career in the networking and software industry. Michel's leadership philosophy is rooted in his ability to transform organizations through strategic innovation and calculated risk taking. He is a visionary leader, consistently delivering results that drive operational excellence. The release of his long awaited book beyond the Code, Unveiling the Human Factor in Technology Leadership Innovation is now available on Amazon. As the former Chief Technology officer and Senior Vice president at Calix Networks, Michelle drove market disruption and challenged conventional thinking. His leadership and strategic vision scaled the company's growth from 1 billion to 3 billion within five years. Well, good afternoon, Michelle. Welcome to the show.
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I'm more than happy to be here. Thanks for inviting.
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Absolutely. Michelle, I appreciate it, making the time. We're two time zones apart. You're in Northern California, they're in Orinda, appreciate it. Near Berkeley and I'm in Kansas City. So sometimes traversing the globe can be difficult, but today it's pretty easy. And I appreciate that. So, Michelle, I'm going to jump into your first question here. Having led significant transformations at companies like Cisco, Juniper Networks and Calix, how did your leadership style evolve across these different corporate cultures and challenges?
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So if you look at those three companies, they're a tale of contrast. If you want the years of Cisco, where I was there, it was more like the booming of the Internet and the dot com. So the leadership was at the time much more technical, I will say, because we're building the foundation that will become essentially routers, which firewall not only for enterprise but also for service provider. And we were trying to do data, voice and video over a single medium if you want the Internet. So it was largely technical at the beginning and I will say up to the years of 2000 when the bubble burst. And that's probably where I learned to do management because we went from the boom to the doom. And literally for 10 years after that it was about rebuilding the business. And I learned after that to manage people. Before that it was easy. You were throwing reward and stuck and people were motivated. Wasn't really hard to manage people after that it was like how do I rebuild the trust with people that doubt there is a future in the company anymore. So it was also how do you streamline the business? We had to become much more efficient. We learned how to do partnership on a global scale. So it became much more into how do you have A common sense of purpose if you want moving forward and how do people can feel that it's still the place to be. So different time. The years at Juniper was more around re engineer of the company. The company was 10 years old, had been extremely successful, was respected as the high performance company, kind of the ultimate sport card in routing at the time. So when I came there it was more of a. They needed people to help with processes at scale, on the quality, on the development, on the productivity. So the challenge was I was coming from the nemesis of that company. So I couldn't simply go and say you're going to do it my way. I have to figure out the ways to enlist the people into the mission and show we're going to carry through. So a lot of this was around building trust within the base, showing them a path where you could say if you involve yourself in that mission, which is essentially transform engineering, we will carry through. I have the support of the executive and instead of me telling you what to do, we're going to build a roadmap together and I'm going to look at your pain point, I'm going to look into your ambition, I'm going to look into what you think needs to be redone or done in a different way and we'll stitch this roadmap together and what carry through. And I told them that look, it's like building a bridge. You can start from both side, but if you don't connect in the middle, everybody is going to look at this as being really ugly if you want. So we had essentially to get it through and that's what we did after three years. Then I went to caddx which was a company more around the edge, to realize that if they don't change completely the company from product to go to market to how they serve the service provider, but more important, how they become more subscriber or customer aware, the company will go belly up. The founder had this vision to say one day new software will be the most important thing for a company to have. Not only from the ability to deploy at scale, but also how to generate revenue if you want recurrent services, software as a services and all device will be connected to the cloud through a broadband connection which happened to matter when. I mean as you knew, when we got Covid, which changed everything, people realized the power of broadband or the lack of equality of broadband if you want. So that's enabled the working from home, that's enabled tons of new applications. Well, I probably never existed there and my style of management There was to take a team which has been seasoned. Most of them were like 15 to 20 years in the company. They've been through the worst. There used to be like hundreds of company in the broadband. When I joined they were left to treat that succeed. So it was more a mentality of surviving. And I was coming with the founder to say we're going to change everything and we hire a new new leader in sales and different type of leader that inject a different point of view. So it was a time where it was probably hard for the people and we have to reassess the talent and the go to market the partnership. But it was really thrilling. It was like building a startup company, public company if you want. But there was no safety net. So we had to basically communicate a lot more what we're going to try to do and what we cannot do and ask the people to give it a last mile effort if you want and we will carry through the mission. So that's a story of those three companies and the way I change a little bit my startup management to become much more inclusive and provide context to decision toward the end if you want.
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Thank you. Yes, very much so appreciate that. And just to highlight a couple things, Michelle, you've obviously worked at some great companies and early on, you know, leadership has evolved over the years. You take Cisco's early days for example, being very technical operations, learning through some of the different challenges like the dot com burst and whatnot was a time that you really gotta build that trust. It's foundational. Of course, you know, as you moved on to companies like Juniper and Calix, you learned a lot through process transformation. Again, building good teams is building that trust. And you know, you just highlighted some very complex and diverse environments where you had to bring teams together and lead and be successful in these very successful Fortune 500 companies. So I appreciate that. Michelle, your new book, beyond the Code, Unveiling the Human factor in Technology Leadership Innovation. It emphasizes the importance of human centric leadership in technology. What inspired you to write this book and what key message do you hope readers take away?
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I think it's a combination of few things. I was asked by many engineers to say young technical leader, director level, to say how do you get one day to the C suite? I thought it was just to be the best on the technical side and then I'll carry through. And then there was a discussion that opened the door to say one, you know, it's not about managing project that's going to be your success, but managing the business. The Customer relationship, your ability to influence and guide as opposed to you do it yourself and enlist the people toward the same purpose if you want. So that was a realization that there was a story to tell there. There was also the reality that over all those years we had like technical training or leadership training and it was mostly focused on the executive. I thought that there was not really a guideline that say, okay, if you're going to basically be running a large group like I had, how do you structure for efficiency? How do you organize the work? How do you create priorities? How do you place short term, midterm, long term investment there? There was not really any book that described that. It was almost like you have a kitchen and nobody put the recipe to, to, to, to basically cook anything. So I thought there was a void there that I wanted to add the passion to do. And then the last straw was really people coming at me, especially the last two, three years. And I'm sure you hear that on your podcast all the time, is AI are going to essentially el engineer. And I wanted to say for me, AI is like the dot com or the software defined networking. It's a technology that had radical implication. It's disruptive, it will create good, it would create also bad. But ultimately it's what we're going to do with it. So I wanted to do people to say it's not going to replace the fact you need teams that are motivated, that are committed, that have courage, that compassion, if you want, because that's the only way you're going to get the trust that you need to carry through and achieve the next summit, if you want. So that was the sum of all of those things, if you want. And my key message is simply to say managing people is not necessarily like guiding your family. First, they are not your, your family, they're colleague and friends. And the ability you have to know, harness their potential is going to be largely your ability to reach out to them and also support them when there's going to be issues or when there's going to be fallout. I was always from a camp to say, learn from your mistake and don't do it three times in a row. That's the key. But when things happen that you cannot control, you just go through and figure out the path. And that's the way I was trained and born. On the farm. You can predict anything on the farm. You need people to operate your farm and you need to be able to do your chore and everything else, otherwise it falls apart. That was a kind of the thinking that led to this book.
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Awesome. Thank you again, Michelle. I like how you unpack some of that right there. You know the first question, how does an engineer get into the C suite?
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Right.
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I know there's a lot that goes into it. Not just managing the project well, but you need to understand the business, the customer, the strategy, obviously building those relationships across the organization. I'm glad you highlighted that. We never got that leadership manual or training, you know, as we graduated college, I think someone said that 68% of supervisors are thrown into a role without any training ever. So I'm glad the book will help leaders and new leaders coming up to help them guide their teams, build that trust within their organization. So thank you. And Michelle, at Calix, you champion the software defined access, SDA architecture and cloud based analytics. How did these innovations position Calix to compete with larger industry players?
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Well, there was three elements of this. I mean there was a lot. I mean if you know, software defined networking, it was this notion that you will distribute the intelligence and there will be different type of capabilities you can enable and you will essentially do it either in a centralized way or a distributed way. So when I went into the access market or the broadband and I knew nothing about it, I mean coming from core networking or enterprise networking and service provider access was kind of the last mile, the thing that connect to your home. But it was largely reduced to be kind of a dumb pipe. It was just essentially depending if you use cable, copper or fiber. This medium will dictate essentially your experience in terms of capacity and speed. So when I sat down with the founder, we look into what we could do. One of our first goal was to say remove all the constraint of access. It should be adaptive, it should be able to be first real able. You should be able to provide different type of level of quality of services and even more important, it should become completely transparent for the subscriber. Because if you've been in your home like I am, I'm the IT person in my home and every time the Internet was going down, the kids will scream at me, don't even know what they're talking about. But they say the SSID is not working, daddy, go fix it. I was like, my God, the first connect we have in the in the house is true wireless when you think about it these days. So why don't we fix the wireless? Why don't we fix the quality of the transport to the distribution point? And the last thing after that is can we have services provided to the cloud that monitor the customer quality at Home so you don't have to be involved into this. I don't think the analogy to see it's a utility model where you turn a switch and you don't think about it. It's more complex than that. But I think what we want is the subscriber to enjoy the services they need and the networking or the social networking they want without having to worry about is this thing is going to work tomorrow. And that was kind of the key thing centric for us. In order to do this we have to create a platform for the home, not a gateway at retail level. It was a carrier class service delivery in the home. We had to retain that class of product that will be involved in broadband. So we took technology out of the enterprise and larger core network and changed the cost point, the form factor and redesigned it for access to get more scale if you want. And then the last thing is we went from typical OS based management application like network management or customer services into completely cloud based enabled architecture if you want and then be able to integrate data in such a way that we could have analytic and eventually make the network not only adaptive but predictable. So be able to predict fault and correct them before the end user even noticed that. So that was essentially a vision and the fact that we needed to innovate because we're literally competing with giant company like Nokia or why we at the time we were outgunned by the number of people they can throw at it. So the only way we could do it faster was to be more nimble, increase the rate of delivery, you know, four time a year is our release model and basically bring solution that have a differentiated value. And if you do this and then you are connecting well and with your customer and you listen to them, that was a recipe to say we're going to break apart. If you want, we're going to take away. And that's what the company did.
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Awesome, thank you, appreciate that. Just again highlight a couple things. I think it's important for our audience. You know when you moved to Calix that SDA architecture was important to your organization. So you all started with the basics in that design, removed all the constraints to access, basically designing it for the lowest common denominator the home. And what I like about being in the middle of some big competition, some big companies out there, you were able to make the network adaptable and predictable. And by being agile and bringing solutions that differentiated value, I think that was really important and that's what I highlighted. So I appreciate that. Michelle, last question of the day. Looking ahead, what emerging technologies or trends do you believe will most significantly impact the networking and software industry? And how should leaders prepare for them?
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Look, I'd experiment now with what I can do with the next generation of product for designing. I think the first thing is going to change is your ability as a, let's say as a small company to integrate technology from others is going to be multiplied by 10x not only this so agent will be offered to you that streamline your processes of development. I mean I'm so jealous when I see the tools available today that basically can do an analysis of the market. ChatGPT for example, you can analyze a market, you can build a business plan, you can validate some assumption about it in matter of what minutes, 30 minutes had the longest if you want and that gives you a blueprint that you say okay, if I marry that now to my age ring science can I basically bring these prototype or those MVP if you want faster than market things that will take me maybe 18 months of investment. I may be able to do essentially a prototype within two to three months and the technology is really there. That's where I'm excited that the pace of innovation will multiply, will be shrink. I think what you're going to see also is the quality of the code will improve because okay, they're probably going to be 20 to 40% of the code generated by Machine AI if you want but they're also going to be improvement in testing because testing for example is tedious. You have to go through every new logic in your code and validate that each one of them is think. I think it will take the human error out of the game a lot and my hope is the engineer are going to spend more time to innovate to think about, you know, how to get to the next summit of innovation versus essentially just cooking the meal if you want. So I think there's going to be radical change there and then everything else is also the go to market. The other change I think will be significant will be the fact that you have access to funding in different ways. I think people are going to be able to partner earlier with those startup or entrepreneur or company that struggle to basically break a week because they're stalling if you want. I think there's going to ways to do partnership that help people to succeed better. And the trick there is to say it's not about invention, it's about innovation. And I think every company moving forward is going to have to become like a system integrator. Last is you focus on customer centric interaction is critical. I mean, gone the days where you go to a customer with a product saying, oh, I'm inventing fire, ooh, take a look at this. I think our customer is really well informed. They socialize among themselves, they see innovation from VCs, venture capitalists, you name it. They listen to what their needs of the company and the employee and that's going to be a big thing. And one hope I have is things like human motivation, training, for example, even recruiting is going to be drastically different moving forward. And my only hope is we don't create a divide between experience in the workforce where there's a bias a little bit against age if you want. These days, I think the company that will succeed in the future will be the one that enlists the best brain and different age. Integrate them together, rally them and basically show that doing a startup is one thing, making market leader is another thing. Emerging as a dominant player and retain your position, that's much harder also to do. And after that you're going to have to reinvent yourself every five to 10 years. So how do you learn to do it? So I'm excited. I think there's a lot of things to do, but there's also a lot of fears around. Well, the technology displays the human displays the brain. And I believe that we're going to figure out these things hopefully with good compliance and regulation as well in the process. Because ultimately it's going to be about how people leverage your data, your analytic, your community, your market to create better solution if you want. So a new ground also on privacy if you want. So that's a little bit the way I look at the world.
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Thank you, Michelle. I appreciate that. You did cover quite a bit there. But I think some of the things that I highlighted was leveraging, obviously AI. Integrating the technology and your products and platforms is now going to grow tenfold, as you mentioned, again, leveraging AI in your daily designs. But what's cool is going to bring efficiencies, remove errors, right? Allowing the human to bring higher level of innovation to the business. And of course the future is all about building customer centric products. I mean, there's a lot more we could talk about. There's many, many hours of discussion around AI in the future and where we're going to head with innovation. But I really appreciate that, Michelle, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
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That was real fun and thanks for doing the work you're doing. I think this is great.
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Bye for now.