Wait Loss

Routing weights, leadership and commodities

I’ve been working on a longer piece about a “sense of place” that I will share once I find a way to tie together punk bands, chic hotels and disease vectors. Earlier this week, a memory popped up on Facebook that made me reflect the last decade of my career arc.

That’s a 275 pound version of me, asking a question of Howard Schultz (stage L), recently re-throned as CEO of Starbucks, in a Juniper Networks town hall with Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson (stage R). It was the first event in the Juniper Networks “Inspiration Dome,” the event space built as part of their growing campus footprint, and a place I snarkily referred to as the “Inhalation Dome” — 30 months into being a Phish fan and I was already making chemistry jokes. All of these details are important.

Juniper was in the throes of a highly competitive market for data center switching and routing, facing challenges not just from other network equipment vendors but the large tech companies who were using white label servers and open source software to build their own switches. Faced with competing with our customers in a “commodity space” I asked Schultz how Starbucks made billions from a traded commodity.

His answer was perfect: Starbucks creates an experience, and that’s what customers want, whether it’s the crafted coffee or a place to work. Implicit in that answer was a detail that changed my career vector: You use commodities once and they are exhausted; whether it’s oil or coffee or orange juice. The experience is similarly a nonce - each visit is different and you never swim in the same coffee river twice.

On a very crowded United flight back to Newark, I had three rather blunt realizations: I was too fat to lower the tray table fully and watch a movie, and I needed to change my commuting habits and lifestyle; Schultz nailed the commodity versus experience trade-off, and I wanted to be more involved in positive experiences; and data was (and is not) a commodity but rather a durable, fungible asset.

A month later I joined Merck, leaving 25 years of technology product and sales leadership and jumping into the very, very deep end of the genetics analysis and bioinformatics pool. Rather than being three arms’ lengths away from social media users, empowered to share more Snapchat (then the king) stories with each other through better backhaul networks, I was directly impacting patients’ lives. A different kind of experience.

Fast forward 11 years from my Facebook nudge: I’m halfway from “Thanksgiving parade balloon” to healthy weight, Kevin Johnson succeeded Schultz as Starbucks CEO and then also retired, Juniper Networks became a division of Hewlett-Packard last month, and we have a more heightened awareness of our private and transactional data. And I’ve been to another 60 Phish shows in a variety of inhalation domes (I don’t partake but it is definitely part of the show experience, each one different and therefore compelling)

What are the endpoints? If you see where your industry is headed, and the competitive or economic landscape is changing, make sure you and your leadership have the best route to the front. Industry leadership doesn’t always translate: a decade into pharmaceutical research and I know about 5% of the science and the science accelerates daily; KJ’s technology leadership didn’t translate to consumable commodities and experiences. One of my hardest transitions has been seeing technology as an ingredient brand to R&D, not the end product, and both relishing and identifying value in that role. The confluence is that experiences matter - whether employee, Phish fan, patient, customer or engineer.