John Pagliuca on leadership philosophy
From #861 Nable Empower 2026: John Pagliuca - ⚙️ Building Resilient Businesses Like a Championship Team · · Joey Pinz Discipline Conversations
“I think the mistake people try to do is that they think they should balance means balancing all the time. What balance really means is understanding when you need to turn off a burner, turn up a couple burners. Now, some of these other folks, if you think about the folks that have that achieve real greatness, they're probably not as balanced. Like an Elon Musk or even some of these these these sports people, right? They've made the decision to almost turn off certain burners, right? Then they go down and they wake up and they're 350 lb.”
On , John Pagliuca, Chief Executive Officer, President & Director at N-ABLE INC, spoke about leadership philosophy during #861 Nable Empower 2026: John Pagliuca - ⚙️ Building Resilient Businesses Like a Championship Team on Joey Pinz Discipline Conversations.
About John Pagliuca
John Pagliuca, CEO of N-able, appeared on the Joey Pinz Conversations podcast in April 2026 to discuss business resilience, cybersecurity strategy, and the company's partnership with Manchester City. He described N-able's Empower 2026 event in Fort Lauderdale as a sold-out gathering of 650 MSPs, praising the leadership team and the event's setup. Pagliuca emphasized that MSPs should focus on "business outcomes" and "business longevity" rather than selling individual security products, and he advised them to seek partners with an open ecosystem that invests in APIs and MCP servers. Pagliuca stated that security is "the center of their growth algorithm" for MSPs, as it can help retain customers, expand existing relationships, and differentiate them to win new business. He also acknowledged a shift in his own thinking, saying that seven or eight years ago he advised MSPs to become MSSPs, but he now believes that was a mistake and that MSPs should not invest heavily in their own SOC. He used a "four burners" analogy to suggest that allocating effort equally across all areas prevents achieving greatness, and he identified "business resilience" as the number one theme for the year, tied to the Manchester City partnership.