Insights with Dave McQuarrie: Leadership, Work-Life Balance, and the Power of Humility

I'm well, thank you for having me on. It's nice to hear my bio. Thank you.

A lot of companies call it an ERG, an Employee Resource Group. We just have a different nomenclature for it. But it's a group of people in each country, and we have them all around the world, who have a passion for and a commitment to advancing those with disabilities in our company and in our communities. It runs the gamut from how we engage into the community with those affected groups, to how we make sure that our offices and our work practices are inclusive and welcoming to people, whether that disability is a physical disability, all the way through to neuro and other diverse people. It's something that I have been involved with for a few years in the company, and for me it was born when my second daughter was born, because I have three children and one of them has a developmental disability. It's been a part of my life for quite a while, and she is an inspiration. So getting involved with this was an easy choice.

Well, it's six places. A few of them I've done more than one, so Australia twice, Singapore twice, Norway twice, and then France, Denmark, and the US. It came about because I was keen to move internationally with work when I was in my early 20s. I was working at the time for Dell, and I got the chance with them, got going, started up in Singapore, and just kept going. I mentioned to you just as we were beginning that I have a Norwegian wife, so one of us was going to be living away from home no matter where we were, and that made it both attractive and easy to keep moving. I've been fortunate to have opportunities with different companies in different places that have always taken us somewhere. The point you make about culture and difference and perspective is really important to me. I come from Australia. Australia is a very large country, far from a lot of places, and many Australians travel, but many don't. We're here in the US, and many Americans travel within the US, many don't travel outside the US. What I have discovered from traveling and living in different places is that I think everybody should have to be a foreigner for a while. Everybody should have to be a visitor in someone else's country for a while, because the perspective, the humility you get from not understanding the language, from being the person that others have to adapt to rather than always being the local, it gives you a lot. It has given me a lot. I have gotten a great benefit from these travels and from living in these places, meeting these people, but also realize that the more of us around the planet that can do that, the better a world we will be in, because the humility and the acceptance and the perspective that we would all gain would be material.

I feel that everyone who knows me would call me humble and kind, so I'll go for humble and kind. I'm working on it. How has it served me? I think it has led me to be curious more. I have to keep reminding myself as I go through my career and as we all build expertise or perspective or experience to remain curious, because I meet new people every day that know things that I am in awe of. That constant exposure to brilliance, and brilliance can be the person you meet in the supermarket who has a perspective on the world that you don't have, all the way through to a person you meet through work. I am inspired by the people around me, and I am therefore humbled a little every time I deal with people who are amazing at their thing, whatever their thing is. It doesn't have to be work. There's also something cultural about it. Australians tend to be, and I would say I am, pretty relaxed about who they're meeting. If they're meeting the janitor or a member of the royal family, they're going to treat them the same, probably refer to them in the same way, and certainly expect the same basic methods of engaging. So I guess there's a little bit that I grew up around and a lot that has come through living and working in different places around the world.

Yeah, there are a few. The first we talked about: humility is important to me. I think you can't take yourself seriously. Everybody I know, my boss, my peers, every leader I've ever met, is where they are through a combination of factors, not solely in their own control. So the idea that you are humble about and don't take too seriously yourself and your accomplishments is really important to me in a leader. The second is lateral thinking. I have always admired, and some of the best leaders I've worked with have demonstrated lateral thinking. It's something that some people are born with, but it's also very easy to practice and get better at through practice. It's not something that I feel is out of the grasp of many. I just see people who practice it as really strong leaders and really inspiring leaders. And then the last would be that they are focused almost always on the advancement of the team or the business versus their own ambition. It's a difficult one because I have no problem with ambition. I'm personally ambitious, but the method by which you should advance is because you allowed, helped, encouraged others to advance, and the team or the company you led to advance, and as a result you should move with it, rather than the goal being that you move upward and everybody else is just around you to support that. So people who are, I guess, servant leadership would be the reference that our industries use. That would be the third one that I look for and have always seen very positively in leaders.

I'll start with a book recommendation. I do a lot of this. I recommend books. I see some behind you, so I'll give you another one. It's called, perhaps predictably, Lateral Thinking by a gentleman named Edward de Bono, who was a well-known speaker in the 80s and 90s. He wrote that book. I encourage everybody to read it. It's written a little bit like it's for school teachers, but it has lots of practical examples of both what lateral thinking is and how to practice it. In its most simple form, it just means coming at the problem from outside or from the side. Too often people think in a linear fashion. They think based on what they're being told, they think based on the current constraints or the current reality. Lateral thinkers ask different questions. They ask questions that would challenge the status quo or challenge, I hear occasionally people refer to it as going back to first principles. It's another method of applying a different way of problem solving than just dealing with what you see. But for me, lateral thinking is best demonstrated by people who pause before addressing the problem to ensure that they're not leaping into it in a frontal or a linear fashion, and ask questions around it as a way of attempting to solve the issue.

It's not a prerequisite because I don't unfortunately think everybody yet practices it, and so if it were, we'd have to go through the ranks and find who was doing it to the extent we want. I think of it slightly differently. It's something I encourage and ask of everybody I work with, that they keep working on it. You mentioned a couple of impressive leaders there. Let's pick on Elon Musk. The notion that an electric car could also be fast and cool was, for me, an example of a lateral thought. Until that moment, electric cars had been, by their nature, uninspiring, at least visually and performance-wise, because their stated purpose was electrical efficiency or battery-driven automotive. He and others decided that that constraint was not a valid one, and so they went and built some capabilities into a car that others hadn't thought about. So I think it's a great example of lateral thinking. And yes, at our company and any company, it differentiates both the people, and if there are enough people practicing it, then the company. One example that we have here recently is we acquired the large AV company a couple years ago. This meeting we're having, which is remote, it has been forever true that when you walk into a meeting room, the tech in that meeting room is not aware of who you are. It's not easy to connect. Just before you and I got on, we were going through making sure that all of our tech worked well, and we just all accept that. At HP, we don't think you should accept that. So we have a vision for the fact that when you walk into a room, the room figures out that that's you. If you're carrying your PC or a device that allows you to connect an HP device, it'll automatically join the meeting, turn microphones and cameras on, turn speakers off, put acoustic fences around the speaker so that noise behind them doesn't get picked up, and use AI to pick up who's speaking in the room from the camera on the wall. This is a vision for this sort of work we're doing, hybrid work, that nobody else has thought through or has articulated. Building and pursuing it is something that is important to us because it allows us to reimagine the way people work, and the way people work is changing pretty dramatically over the last few years.

I think more companies are struggling than not. I don't know many companies who have figured this out. And figured this out, I don't mean made a mandate, right? 'Nobody comes back to work, everybody come back to work.' These are mandates. That doesn't mean figure it out. That just means taking a position and hoping that that position is going to work out. So far, with a few exceptions, obviously if you work physically in a hospital or you're a police officer, you go to work, and that has been true through the pandemic and it will remain true for the future. For the rest of knowledge workers, where to work and how to work and whether it's in an office, most companies are still figuring out. The thing that's interesting about why we are where we are, and then we'll get to what we ought to do about it, but why we are where we are is that leaders through the last decades, maybe hundreds of years, have had precisely what you described. They have had proximity. It has been a standard operating model of how we work. We work with each other, we're physically there, we can spot micro movements that somebody does that tells us whether or not they're engaging, we can see, as you said, respectfully touch the workers and the colleagues that we have. Most leaders have not adapted to the change. At HP, we ran a large survey recently that discovered that the majority of employees feel that their leaders have not changed their style to acknowledge this different method of working. So for all of us as leaders, that's the challenge. It's not so much what's the right answer, because for every company and even within company every team, the answer could be different. For our engineers being in the office to collaborate or stand around a circuit board or a whiteboard to design something, this is important. For a person who's doing analysis on a spreadsheet, that can work at home on that work. So we are not going to have one answer as a company, but as a leader, as a group of leaders, acknowledging that people feel more remote, they feel less seen, they don't have those moments in between, the water cooler moments or the corridor conversation, and adapting how we engage, this is our responsibility. So far, as a collective, we are not rising to the challenge.

Yes, we ought to be happy doing it. It's a big change, and it's everything from the mundane, like how you allocate your time. What you used to get almost by default just as a consequence of being there, you've now got to schedule, whether that's time with people or connecting to those people. This sounded crazy during the pandemic, but we did it: virtual happy hours and virtual coffees where people would come together in a way they used to because they couldn't do it in person, to try and recapture that part of the job and of the work that was so important. But the discipline around acknowledging first that it has changed and applying time specifically to recapturing or to recreating that which is missing, most of us don't do. We're too busy, or we just assume that it will take care of itself. So for me, being deliberate about it is the first step. The second is there's a lot of content out there on how to handle this different world that we're in. Whether it's conversations like this and how we frame and how we allocate the time we're going to spend, to when you should come into the office and I should come into the office if we have that opportunity so we can be there together, to how do we ensure that we're giving space for what would normally happen in a one-on-one or in an in-person conversation, which is harder here. Some of those tactics and practices, there's a lot of content out there, and I think leaders should, on this subject and many others, be constantly reading and constantly learning so that that which is known we can know. There is nothing new under the sun, as the expression goes. I feel like leaders who read and who are, back to where we started, humble about the fact that they can continue to learn, are going to be best placed. When you couple that hunger to learn with some discipline and some practices that we talked about, I think people will improve. It's not going to be a silver bullet, but it's going to be an improvement versus where we are today.

First, what did the data tell us? The creep of work into the home, because when the pandemic started we were working from home, has persisted. So even though we can come back to work, many of the practices that used to be acceptable during the pandemic have persisted. I'll give you a simple example. In our day here in the US on the West Coast, because if you have a global role you end up doing calls early in the day to catch Asia, and then through the course of the morning with Europe, and then again in the evening to catch Asia again, and then through the course of the day in the US of course you're talking to people. But because people commuted to offices, we used to have a relatively small amount of very early calls on our team and our people's calendars. When the pandemic hit, there was no commute, and so the calls could start early, and they did. As we've all come back, they remain. So now a lot of people who used to get on the phone or in meetings at 7:30, 8, 8:30 are now doing so at 6, 6:30 because of a practice we started but haven't stopped. There are dozens of examples like that, whether it's how our calendars have changed, the amount of time in between, the assumption that because you don't have to physically move from one place to another that meetings can happen more often, the problem that you just described which is we're not seeing as much of each other so we're trying to increase the one-on-ones and the time in between. These all have led to this feeling you describe of people saying there's no such thing as work-life balance. My view on how to deal with that, and at least the way that I deal with that, is if you're a knowledge worker, if your output is what you're paid for, then you should focus on that rather than allocating time and worry to, am I showing the company that I'm available? Am I answering that email the instant that I get it, which means I've always got to be on, which means I don't have work-life balance? Focus on the things you deliver. If what you're delivering is meaningful, then when you put your phone down or your PC down and you move away from work to life, if that's how you think of it, do so with confidence. Don't regret that you're not working. I find a lot of people will constantly be picking up their phone and they'll see an email from their boss or they'll worry that there's an email that they haven't answered that'll be playing in the back of their mind. I think there is this discipline we need that says when I'm not working, I'm not working, and I need to be okay with that because when I'm working, I'm giving everything I've got, and the company's getting from me what it needs and what I owe it. I worry that people feel they're not able to break away or step away. It has been both my view and my practice and my counsel to people in our company that when you're working, that's terrific, but when you're not, you need to lean into not working, because the worst thing you can do is not be working for us but not be doing the thing that you purport to be doing, whether it's spending time with your family or spending time on your own. I think there's a level of admitting that when you're not working, you need to be fully committed to that thing so that when you are working, you can be fully committed there, and that it's okay to have both of those two things make up different parts of your life.

Yes, so the answer is yes. The thing that is terrible about this dynamic is too many people in the workforce feel that they might be judged poorly for not being fully focused on work at any moment, that the work might need them. As you just said well, and I agree, we regard more highly those who are able to give everything while they're with us and then give everything to whatever they're doing when they're not. The irony is the person that worries that they're not giving enough is actually, because they're half in all these situations, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So my strong perspective is if you can apply the discipline to be fully committed to do the work, if you are proud of the work you do, if you are making change and getting results in your job, and when you're not doing that, do whatever else it is that's important to you with the same vigor and discipline and attention, and then come back and do the work the next day or the next hour. It doesn't matter what the frequency is. It just matters that you're all in to whatever it is you're doing. So yeah, I find that the most impressive leaders are the ones who are able to unapologetically focus on something else, and that when they're with us, they're uncompromising about their focus and their contribution at work.

Any tool, any technology can be used for good or for evil, one might claim. Certainly some technologies are used in both directions. This one here, I think, has far more opportunity for good than for nefarious purposes, and we are focused on the good. The first thing I would say is AI as a technology has been around for decades. In fact, it was in the mid-50s, early 60s that it was first born. The AI that we all use and experience today is pervasive in many products, in many software and apps and other services that we're all exposed to. Generative AI, the thing that has taken the world by storm in the last year or so, is transformative on its own. I don't know whether it's a good analogy, but I consider it similar to the advent of electricity. It's that transformational, because we already use AI for many things. I talked about cameras. Our cameras already have AI using them for face tracking so that they know which face in the room is doing the talking and they can focus in on that one. Our printers use AI, of old or of present, in machine learning to use sensors to listen for the sound of a drum that might be about to fail so we can proactively replace it before the printer experiences a failure. This has been used for years. Generative AI is going to transform once again the landscape. We have a number of products in the pipeline for that. The place that is going to be the most apparent to most people is the AI PC, which is something that we've announced in the last month, and we will continue to roll more products out. The reason this is going to be different is people today use AI from the cloud. You go to ChatGPT, you ask a question, it goes up to the cloud, it grinds, it comes back, gives you an answer. Today, all generative AI is happening in the cloud. But the ability for you to do it locally, some of that work locally, doesn't exist today in any meaningful fashion, and we're bringing that to market this year. That will mean three things to customers: it'll mean faster, it'll mean more secure because your data doesn't have to leave the device, which a lot of people do worry about in terms of their privacy, and it'll mean more cost effective because as the cloud grows, you're going to expect cost to go up. So there's a big transformation coming, not just in all of us using generative AI to do things like write emails, read emails. This conversation, if it's being recorded, generative AI could take it, transcribe it, take actions out of it. If you or I gave one another an action like this book recommendation, it would send emails saying buy these books to these people, or it would tell you and I in our accounts to order them. All of that is available today, but we're getting to the point where we can put that capability on the client, and we really want people to be able to benefit from that power over these next years. So it's an exciting time. We're going to get a lot of capability people can't even imagine.

There are going to be improvements in the offerings like this. The ways that we talk, just taking this way that we're talking right now, two cameras staring at us and us looking at them. These capabilities I'm describing will allow a lot more work to be done on the device. Right now, at the moment, for the devices you and I are using, probably desktops, power management is not the biggest issue. But if you're using a notebook somewhere because you're on the move, having the device really able to make you appear your best, to blur out the background, to make sure that you're eye tracking right if you're looking at the screen rather than looking at the camera, all of these things can be done on the device in a way that makes that experience better. So yeah, it's a bright future for the next few years in this space of client capabilities, user at the edge capabilities, making our lives easier and better.

Something that I'm passionate about, which I talk about often in these sorts of conversations, is the philosophy of the Stoics, or Stoicism. It's a Greek philosophy. It had some pretty famous adherents. There are some modern-day folks who talk about it. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius was a fan. Again, I'll give another book recommendation. Marcus Aurelius wrote something not meant actually as a publication. He wrote it for himself, called Meditations. I encourage people to read it.

I think there's a lot in the philosophy. I don't have to explain to you, but maybe to your listeners, people sometimes misunderstand it. They think it's about being stone-faced or being unemotional. I find the opposite. I find that it encourages us to take joy from what we have rather than to constantly be waiting for or looking for that next thing. In that way, it's one of the most joyous ways you can approach life. It also encourages discipline, which we have talked about. It also encourages focus on what you can control. In the workplace, there are always things you can't control. You can be out of control of the strategy of the company if you're in middle management, or you can be unable to control the marketplace if you're in senior management. There will always be something that is out of your control. Among other things, the Stoics encourage us to focus on that which we can control, and that allows us to have an impact that doesn't frustrate us and doesn't distract us. So I encourage people to read that. There's another, we started this conversation around my work with our Disability Impact Network. There's another publication by Seneca, you probably have it, On the Shortness of Life. I think it's a wonderful publication. There's just all the material that the Stoics wrote, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius among others. I encourage people to read because a lot of that work is good. On the Shortness of Life is a very brief book, and it encourages us to remember why and what we're here for, and not to lose time or waste time in the pursuit of what's important to us. So I always encourage people to think about that when we get into this sort of subject.

LinkedIn is easy. My email address, I'll give it to them. It's very easy: [email protected]. People can connect to me with that or on any of the social platforms that they can find me on. I'm open to it. I love talking about this stuff and connecting. As I said earlier, every successful person I know is where they are because others helped them. If I can be of any help to anyone in advancing what they care about, I'd love to be a part of it.

Thank you for having me.