Vivek Kundra on "Focus on Ruthless Execution"

Please welcome Vivek Kundra. Good evening, Lilan. Thank you very much for that kind introduction. It's great to be here in Copenhagen. What I want to do is take you back in time to November of 2008. President Obama was just elected, and one of the first things they did was put in place a transition team focused on technology, innovation, and government reform. Fast forward to January of 2009, and I got a phone call that the president had decided to appoint me as his first Chief Information Officer. For many of you, if you remember back then, even the president had to fight tooth and nail just to get a Blackberry. I remember walking into the office on a sunny day in Washington, and I had to pinch myself. As the Marine Corps saluted you, you walked in, I got into my office, met with my new team, and immediately they handed me this huge stack of documents and said, 'Mr. Kundra, congratulations, you're now responsible for $80 billion in Information Technology for the United States government, and here are $27 billion of technology projects that are years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget.' Then I found out that the way mobile devices were assigned to the government was based on the number of years you'd been in office or the square footage of your office, given how the bureaucracy worked. I think the biggest asset I brought to the job was a beginner's mind because I had never worked in the federal government. I was asking the question, 'Why can't it be?' and pushing the limits of what was possible. I looked at my team and said, 'Look, I've just testified under oath, so we better go build this.' But in this new world order, you have to be able to build your own red teams and blue teams, constantly attacking your own systems. You also recognize that given these new models of technology with mobile, social, and cloud, you may not, as an enterprise, be the best one when it comes to cybersecurity. As Jack Welch talked about earlier, what is your core competency and what are you focused on? That led us to fundamentally rethink our technology model in the government, where we decided to move away from a model of asset ownership, building everything, to a model of asset provisioning or service provisioning. That allowed us to identify about $20 billion in savings as we started shifting investments to cloud computing, which is super exciting because what you were able to see is a pace of innovation. The next generation of companies, whether it's Google, Amazon, Salesforce, Concur, or Workday, they represent what the future is going to look like when it comes to technology. As I look at the future, what I think is super exciting is that you're looking at a population of about 7.1 billion people today. By 2017, it's predicted there will be five billion people with smartphones. The reason that's significant is because most businesses have to be able to look around the curve to figure out what that means in terms of your business, the company you're running, and how you capitalize on it, how you make sure you don't become the Kodak of this era. What I would advise, as you're thinking about the future, is a great quote we got from one of our customers: You want to be first to the future so you can welcome your customers before your competitors do.

I think one of the best experiences I've ever had in my life. What's amazing about the president is that his background as a constitutional lawyer really employs a Socratic method. If you're sitting with him in meetings, he'll end up picking on the quietest person in the room and say, 'What is your perspective?' He has the ability to triangulate, ask the tough questions. When you think about presidents, they only get the toughest, most difficult problems, so it weighs heavily, but he does a masterful job of applying the Socratic method and arriving at the right decisions.

I think the way you have to be able to do that is you've got to have a view that's absolutely global. But the way you're able to do that is by bringing to the table something of value. You've got to be able to create meaningful value, solve meaningful problems, and then focus on ruthless execution.

We've got an amazing CEO named Marc Benioff who does something phenomenal around aligning everybody. The view is to allow tactics to inform your strategy. In a company of about 12,000 people, one of the things you have to do is make sure you're constantly aligning the team. Every quarter, we get together as a management team, everybody presents, and we make sure we go deep on whether it's the numbers, the technology, or the innovation we're driving, constantly questioning where we are, recognizing the speed and pace at which the world is moving, so we're able to keep on a basis where you're not only thinking about quarterly earnings from a Wall Street perspective, but you're actually thinking about innovation and fundamentally making major strategic changes in direction on a quarterly basis. The worst thing you can do is put a strategy in place and stick to it no matter what's going on. So you've got to have a strategy, but also realize the world is constantly changing, and you need to be able to adjust your tactics based on that.