OYP Episode 52: John Weston

John Weston, Senior Vice President Global Microsoft Practice at Publicis Sapient and 20+ year veteran of Microsoft, tells us about the power of unlocking your growth from the traditional corporate ladder, the value of mastering extemporaneous speaking, and the importance of embracing your opportunity to lead regardless of your title of career stage.

Interview

Peter Szczerba - Welcome back to the Own Your Potential Podcast, where you'll hear stories from leaders across the globe about how they've taken control their career growth and lessons on how you can too. I'm Peter Szczerba, and today I have the extreme pleasure of sitting down with John Weston, Senior Vice President, Global Microsoft Practice at Publicis Sapient. John it's an absolute pleasure to have you on today. I've been looking forward to this one, why don't we just jump right into it? Can you take us through your career journey leading up until this point?

John Weston - Yeah, big glad to so after high school, went to college at Southern Methodist University here in Dallas, Texas. So I've always been a Dallas guy, which is kind of unusual in the field that I've been in, but thought about right out of college, interviewed with the big players, IBM's, and the T eyes of the world. And I said, you know, that's not for me. So I started my own software company. The day after I graduated from college, and did that for 10 years with my brother, I learned an immense amount of things. We were partners with IBM partners with Microsoft hired hundreds of people over the years. And then we sold it. And that was a really interesting experience to sell it to one of our customers. After that, I then became a contractor to Microsoft. So I really kind of, we were a big partner, Microsoft. And that was kind of the mothership, to me, always a really cool company. And I was a contractor to them, doing training and training their new people on technology and the first, gosh, probably six or seven years there. And then they asked me to join as a full time employee. So all up at Microsoft, I was there about 25 years. So did my own thing for 10 years, and then Microsoft for 25 years at Microsoft that we could talk all day, just about all this stuff I did at Microsoft. And then two years ago, I decided to take an early retirement from them. And come over here to publicist sapient. And just kind of start over again, I'm really building out what we call the Microsoft practice. My view on that is I'm an entrepreneur inside of a $10 billion company of building a new business that already was here. It was just in the beginning stages, but we really want to make it into a, you know, hundreds of millions of dollar business inside of our consulting organization around Microsoft technologies and partnering with Microsoft in that space. And so it brings together my experiences of owning my own company, built, you know, doing application development, and as technical technologist, my sales capabilities. And then of course, all the kinds of things that I learned over the 25 years at Microsoft. And so it's been a fun journey to get to this point.

Peter Szczerba - Unreal and I want to jump straight into the entrepreneurial aspect of this because obviously, you've come full circle, and you're kind of channeling that that mindset, again, now pupils who sapient, but, you know, to make that decision to jump into starting your own business, and then growing into something big enough to, you know, sell and hire hundreds of people straight out of school. What was what went into that decision making framework? I know that you kind of mentioned briefly that, you know, you looked at the big players, it wasn't necessarily for you in that moment. And then you made this leap. But how did it like what was the process behind that?

John Weston - Yeah, so it had some experience already. Right. So I, my dad had always had consulting businesses on the side of either a professor or other jobs that he did. And so he had, he'd run through those own businesses several times. So I got to see that and witness that as a child, right. In high school, even I was always trying to figure out you know, how to make money, you know, newspaper routes, or, or different, you know, things that I could do to make money. One of my favorite stories to tell in college was at SMU, the freshman you have choice either to live at home or live in the freshman dorms and the freshmen dorms are the oldest dorms and there, there's no carpet and they're very small and and you know, it's there's some money that comes to that school. And so it was interesting, we would go to the carpet remnants store and buy carpet and cut it out to fit the floor. Well, in July, or in May, when you moved out you had to take that out. So I would go around and for $5 I would pull the carpet out. And then I'd roll it up store it my parents garage, come August I would vacuum it and resell the same carpet. I sold the same piece of carpet for years in a row in college. And because all the dorm rooms are exactly the same space, so a piece of carpet would work in any dorm room. Right? And so I've you know, and we would jack the beds up with cinder blocks so I would go by cinder blocks and for 10 bucks I would bring you four cinder blocks and jack up your bed for you and for $25 I put in a piece of carpet for you but I literally sold the same piece of carpet for different years in college. So I was already an entrepreneur trying to figure out ways and I paid for my books, you know, I paid for part of my college education by doing those kinds of things. And I was a contract programmer on the side while going to college full time, you know, so I was always looking at ways to make money. So having my own business, being an entrepreneur, was already inbred in me long before I graduated college, and it was a hard decision, you know, obviously, being out of college, just getting married and having, you know, just kind of getting started with no safety net, right? I mean, we had to go figure out how to create a business, create a business plan, get, you know, and, and grow it out of cash flow. And that, you know, to me, I still today have that entrepreneurial spirit, right, as I mentioned, in my intro, you know, I view that I'm building something inside of the company, I'm here, you can always be an entrepreneur, even if you're in some of the biggest companies in the world. I've built teams, I've built products, I've built solutions. And and, and that's because of the the way I think, like an entrepreneur, regardless of the size company that I work in.

Peter Szczerba - Yeah, no, I think that resonates hugely for me, because I think that there's just like this kind of bug that you can be born with that just like you always look at the angle of how can I capitalize on this opportunity to make money, for example, and like, you know, that resonates with me, because I, as many people are these days, I play video games, but we're in a digital age where those can be simply downloaded, right? stored on storage, or played through cloud, or whatever the case is, I still buy physical games. And my friends asked me well, why so well, because I can't sell a digital game after I'm done. Right? So it's like, I'm mitigating the cost of playing this game. Because, you know, you can either pay $80 and then have a sunken cost, or you can pay $80 and sell it for 50 and pay it forward towards whatever else, right. And so, you know, I think that really resonates with me, and but you know, when you embark on that straight out of school, you know, it's one thing to have experience just being focused on turning things into opportunity around making money. But then is another thing around standing organization up, you know, managing the product aspect of like, what you're trying to build, create, service your clients with, or whatever the case is. But then also, there's, as it grows, without, you know, a ton of experience, you're now having to develop grow like a culture, instead of an organization, you having to create opportunities for hopefully high performance, high potential people to want to stay with you and grow with you. So how did you, you know, what were the growing pains and kind of the ways that you learn how to do that, right? Because that's a different skill set than standing up a money making business and a product?

John Weston - Yeah, growing pains are interesting. A lot of them revolve around money. Because we didn't have a line, you know, we didn't have a bank loan, we didn't have huge financial investors, we did it purely out of cash flow, right. So we were, we were limited really, in our growth by two factors. One, how many people my brother and I could manage them before we put it in a second layer of management and two was cash flow to how fast we could grow it. Now, we were pretty conservative, right? My brother's more conservative than I am, which is good. You know, it saved us several different times. But it, you know, cash is king, and being able to only grow as fast as you can cash flow it. And one of the interesting things I had a gentleman by the name of Robert glaze, is no longer with us. But he was a customer of ours. And he gave us some great advice. He said, companies don't fail because it has a bad idea companies fail because they run out of cash. Yeah, and you may have the best idea in the world. But if you don't manage it properly, from you can actually outgrow yourself, right. I mean, you could be too successful, and not be able to deliver on what you've sold. And so we always kept that at heart. And, and sometimes that limited how big we could get. You know, at one point, we had a competitor of ours, get into some trouble and actually wanted to sell to us. And so we were like, okay, but they were there were some issues there. And so we actually hit that guy actually went out of business closed his business. So we hired some of his employees. And we actually hired him to bring some of his customers over with us. That didn't always go so smoothly, right? And then when we were going to sell the company, with several people try to buy it, and it it's not just about the money. It's about feeling right, right. I mean, it like we wanted to take care of our employees, we wanted to do the right thing. It had to be the right fit. We didn't we didn't want them to change the culture. Right. And, and it it that's why we you know, we had several different offers from hardware companies or big companies to buy us that wanted to get into the space that we were in. And the company you know, we were a consulting company, we were doing project application development work in the late 80s and early 90s. Right and you think about that world is very differently than it is today. We had different programming languages and different tools. And we sold it to one of our customers and that customer was in the business of staff augmentation, if you will, and they viewed exactly what we did is staff augmentation and It wasn't a perfect match. But it still was, you know, we did some pretty cool things we negotiated in the deal. You know, again, as I mentioned, cash flow, we didn't have the latest and greatest computers, and we couldn't afford to buy everybody the nicest machines and offices and stuff. So we really want to take care of the employees. So we negotiated in the deal that every employee got a new computer as part of the deal. And so what we did is that we bought Dell laptops and desktops. And so we actually had those shipped to my house. And so we inked the deal. And we had we bought the computers had them shipped to my house. And we were 5060 employees at that time. And so we, um, on a Sunday night, brought them all from my house to the conference room covered up with a big blue tarp called a special employee meeting. And we basically in person announced, we've sold the company, we're not going anywhere, both of you know, the ownership is going to stay here. And here's our new role in the new company. And they were like what's behind the tarp? So we pulled down the tarp and says, And by this afternoon, every one of you get a new computer.

Peter Szczerba - I mean, it's such an awesome gesture. And just like, it's a demonstration of keeping your people in a priority lens, right to know, there's these quality of life, things that might seem insignificant, that could drive so much happiness in the workplace that just make people want to work harder, make them thankful, right? Make them look through things with a more positive lens. So I mean, it's just awesome to hear that. And I think what you were you taught the what you mentioned, that quote around this idea of companies don't fail because they have bad ideas, but because they run out of cash. I think that's a really powerful sentiment, right? This idea that a company can be successful but outpace itself, and still fail. Right?

John Weston - And that Robert told me that 35 years ago, and it still it just resonates with me today,

Peter Szczerba - You know, I mean it man, and but having that sort of guidance, let's say in a critical moment, right? Like, when you were an entrepreneur early in your career, I think that can it can vary significantly shaped your perspective and your approach, right, that could define success or failure. And so I guess, you know, I want to talk a little bit about that from like a mentorship standpoint. Right? Did you find that, across that an entrepreneurial period? And then we'll obviously go into more detail on your stretch at Microsoft, but like, did you have mentors that played key roles that that helped shape that?

John Weston - Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Um, yeah, so as I mentioned, we had Robert, during the, when we had Western brothers. At Microsoft, I had what I called my board of directors, right? over the 18 years, as an employee there, I probably had 20, or 25, managers, and there was three or four of them that I really today even would work for in a heartbeat, trusted with all things. And when I made it, you know, cuz you make a lot of career decisions, and to stay at a company for 25 years. Whenever I was about to make a big career move, or career decision, I brought that board together now, maybe not in person, maybe not all in the same room, but I would go to them, and ask for advice. And I would say, look, here's my current situation, here's what I'm thinking about doing. What am I not thinking about? And what is your perspective and just sit and listen? And, and it just incredible coaching, right? I mean, you know, sometimes, when you navigate a big company like Microsoft, it's so critical to be at the right place at the right time pick this job to get the next job after it. But I, I really got so much out of that mentoring, and I wanted to get back. And so I was probably doing a little bit of mentoring before Microsoft at Microsoft, there's a formal mentorship program where you can sign up and say, here's the topics I'm interested in. Here's the experiences I've had in glad to mentor. And so I got started with a formal program. Now that formal program went away after a couple of years. But you know, I would say probably the last 10 years at Microsoft on any given occasion, I probably had 10 people that I was mentoring, right? And the way that here's my rules of engagement for mentoring, I still do this today. It once a month, you'll get 30 minutes or an hour depending upon the situation. And so once a month, you get 30 minutes of my time, and you own the agenda as the is the mentee. And we talk can talk about whatever you can come to me with questions you can come to me with situations you can ask my advice or we can just talk about life right and in people want to tap into my experiences that I've had and learn from that what people don't realize as a mentor I learned so much from them. Right? And that's why I continue to do it because yes, I do it because I'm giving back and helping others as as I have been helped in the past. But but it it to me I learn a different perspective. We all see our world from the day we live in it every day but when you see outside of that, you know some of my favorite mentors at Microsoft had one guy was in what they call the mock program mock MBA, which is that is this early in career straight out of college because yo, so he went back and got his MBA and then straight out of MBA came to Microsoft. And so I this was this guy's mentor, and he didn't understand hierarchy, right? I mean, I was seven layers from the CEO, there were certain things you didn't, you would skip levels with your manager, but you would never go to your boss's boss without telling your boss or, you know, those kind of that just was meaningless to him. And, and that was so refreshing. It was so scary, right? But but you know, if he deleted a lawyer on the deal he was working on He called the head lawyer at Microsoft, he didn't understand that there were maybe in hundreds or 1000s of lawyers, there's a certain person he was supposed to call, He called the head one and said, Hey, I need your help. You know, and it just was refreshing perspective. You know, back in those days, we, we did everything by written and by email, right, very email he brought in and he says, No, John, we're going to do everything by video, I'm going to interview you, kind of like we're doing this podcast today. He came in and inner video interviewed me and shared the video with all of the mock hires. Right? It was it was just, you know, he was doing more managing up than I it was such a different perspective, right, a young perspective, I was always set in my ways of doing things. And I've been there for so many years and knew how to navigate the world. He didn't care about navigating the world, because it his role was a different world than mine. And I really learned to relate to them still connect with him. You know, often, we don't do it monthly anymore, because he's now on the other side of the world. But you know, it, it just is to me, it's refreshing to learn from people by mentoring them. And most people don't understand that the mentor gets just as much out of it as the mentee.

Peter Szczerba - Yeah, I think what's key there is what you said is that most people don't understand that and that I think that mentorship, right if for you mentioned having up to 10 people that you're mentoring, and that's probably over and above your team that you're managing. Absolutely. And so when you think about that, it's very easy for somebody who's looking at mentorship as a one way road where they're just providing disproportional value that that becomes, you know, a time soccer becomes something that they're not enjoying, or they feel like they're, they're forced to do. That's not the case at all. I think if you were to approach it from the outset, with the mindset that you have, that each and every one of these conversations is as much a learning opportunity for me, as it is for the mentee, that totally changes the experience for both parties. And then also exponentially, I think increases the value that everyone extracts out of the interaction.

John Weston - Yeah, it's some people dread doing a mentor, right? Because oh my gosh, his time I got to give away to me, I look forward to it. Because I'm going to learn a new, I'm going to see a different perspective. And I'm going to add to my set of stories, right? I mean, I'll give you another quick mentor, you know, I do stuff outside of your work. I got my wife's a teacher, friend, teacher, friend of hers, her husband got laid off, he'd been at a bank auditor for 20 years. You know, anybody outside the bank, he didn't know what LinkedIn was, right? He didn't even know where are helping find a job. So I got him on LinkedIn. We got him. You know, he had kids in college. So we had to find a new job, you know, pretty quickly. And so yeah, helped him land a job. And it didn't last because he was in sales. And he'd never done sales before but but he came out of the experience with sales experience, he learns that he doesn't like to sell right. I mean, yeah, yes. Kind of good. But I really kind of worked with him in a career of okay, that career you had is over right, there. You go, the the world you knew is gone. Let's reinvent yourself, what do you what do you like to do? What do you want to go? Do you know, and just, you know, helping him through that process was so rewarding to me. We were still really good friends today. And I don't know, I don't want a finder's fee or I don't want it, you know, any money for me. I enjoyed the process, and the success in finding that next job. And then next career, it really was rewarding to me to help see someone transition from that because he was in a tough spot. Right? Yeah. And I hit I could help. I was connected to people. I know a lot of people. And it wasn't directly related to someone that I knew that helped him get the next job. But it helped him think and helping start learning how to use tools like LinkedIn, to land that next job. And that to me was so rewarding.

Peter Szczerba - I think this idea of kind of offering that sort of disproportionate value, everywhere that you can, it translates to to opportunities and benefits for you down the line as well. I think you mentioned for example, that your board of directors that you carried with you across your career at Microsoft that you would work with any of them in a heartbeat, right? Absolutely. And so having a network of people like that, that you would do that for they'd benefit from that because they know that if they ever had an incredible opportunity, they can look around and say Yeah, exactly like that. That's a person I can call and we're gonna partner to Do something great, right? Or I can ask for for support or whatever. And I think that there's like a natural synergy that grows when you kind of approach it that way. I want to talk a little bit more about that board of directors, I think it's an important thing. You were at Microsoft, you said for 18 years. And that's a long time to be at a place. I'm sure that you know, that it's one thing for that board of directors that have helped you navigate the internal opportunities. But you're you're driven, ambitious person, just based on like, your entrepreneurial spirit and stuff, obviously. So there's probably opportunities for you or potentially looking externally to where you can use that board of directors to candidly assess those opportunities as well. Because I think that that's a unique thing. If you were I don't know, people have that type of guidance.

John Weston - Yeah, absolutely. And, and those opportunities came, right. And you know, from competitors of Microsoft, and customers and others, that were interested in me, what I always came back to is, I love the company, I love the product that Microsoft builds. And they had what I called golden handcuffs on me, you know, I'm I looked at an outside opportunity, the golden handcuffs for stock grants, right, which vest over time, and it, if you leave, you lose that money, right? And it and it was such a missed opportunity. I mean, obviously, if you look back at the last 25 years in the Microsoft Xbox and what it's done, even if you go back, when I was in the contract days, I had people that you know, their net worth was doubling every year because the Microsoft stock they owned in the 80s and 90s. Now, obviously, it was flat for a decade there in the middle. But now it's back on the rise again. Right. And so, you know, why did I get asked many times? Why did you finally leave Microsoft after that long time? Why didn't you stay till you know, you stopped working and, and they they have a thing that Microsoft called early retirement when you reach age 55, and you've been there 15 years continuous in the US. And that's key, you can't leave, you got to stay 15 years straight. You're allowed to leave and those golden handcuffs are gone. You continue to invest in your stock. And so wow, that's that was not the only reason I didn't leave the company, I left a bad manager. Right. That's a whole nother story. But but but it's a, you know, the golden handcuffs were gone. And so it changed the perspective of the decision to come here to Poulos. It was, you know, any opportunity I'd looked at before that timeframe, the value of that stock made it worthwhile to stay at the company, regardless of the situation.

Peter Szczerba - Yeah, I think I mean, that that makes obviously a lot of sense. And that's a great insight, right, as people weigh opportunity cost of leaving in their own careers when they listen to this, whatever organization they're at currently. But I mean, there had to be another side to that coin, as you were kind of flipping back and forth is, you know, what were the opportunities for you to navigate or change or reinvent your career within Microsoft, and I think was a blast, there was a ton of that opportunity for you. And you have a pretty crazy story arc there. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

John Weston - Yeah. So it when I started at Microsoft, that culture was every two years you needed to take a new job, or something was wrong with you? Right? Are you there was okay, you're supposed to do sales, okay, you're supposed to do support, you're supposed to do services, you know, they get a well rounded career, and always moving around. And that basically was, it takes you six months to figure out a role. It takes you six months after that to kind of get really good at it. And then the next second year is kind of you're proficient at it and have a very high success. You take that success and then find your next job. And in some cases that worked well, in other cases, like account continuity, right? I mean, there somebody account manager was changing every year or two years, right. So that was negative. What happens those if you stayed in the same job for five years or more of that you were branded, oh, you're that presenter guy, or you're that exchange guy, you're that SQL, you know, you're that person, you have a persona that's hard to overcome. And then the organization changes, right. I mean, the Microsoft today is radically different than the Microsoft that I joined. And, and you have to adapt, you have to change, you know, their cloud company today. They weren't a cloud company 15 years ago, right? You have to think about how you change your skill set. And look at what's coming. I was on a team called the evangelism team, right? That we went around and gave 200 speeches a year because I love to be on stage and do presentations. And I saw Azure come out. I was like, that's it. And when it first came out, I didn't do much at all, it was a very minimal product, but I saw the I bought into the vision and the future of cloud computing 13 years ago. Right? And you think about I flipped my career 100% Azure since then, and that's obviously paid off very well for me. But you know, may have not have said, okay, you know, I'll just stay in this speaking role and do that I but I really said, I see the future there and switch to everything Azure along that way. I'd really interesting. So it did change pretty frequently, but it's an it I did, I made a couple of really interesting non traditional changes. When Microsoft is a manager and the and the, and the, the perception was your question. To become a manager, which is called an m two or an M three, which is manager of managers, you know, and all the way up to the Vice President, right? So you, you're wanting to go up the corporate chain is that tradition. And once you're a manager, you would never go back to be an individual contributor or an individual person and not managing people. And I was there probably five years, and I done quite well. Rome is Kingdom buildings, right? I mean, is that you're measuring by the size of your organization. And in your span of control, and the further I got up into management, and so I was managing just managers, not individual contributors. I got further away from technology and further away from the customer, and was end up doing I was in these meetings and building spreadsheets, and do an internal meetings. It just drove me crazy. I was like, I got to get out of this. And, and went through some pretty rough reorganizations and said, you know, what, I'll just go back to being an individual contributor. And it was, like, you're ending your career. That's, you're done. You've you've given up on the dream of climbing the corporate ladder. Yeah. And I said, you know, I don't care. It's what's best for me. It's what I enjoyed doing. And I was very successful as an individual contributor helped do the Walmart, Azure deal, right? It was the largest cloud deal in the world, six years ago. And obviously, there's been way bigger ones since then. But yeah, it kind of put me on the map as I was a successful seller. And then they have one of those career kind of assessment things. They did this, it was a career opportunity to kind of where do you want to go next with your career? And after you're successful, there's obviously it opens a lot of doors. And they said, they said, What skills do you have that we're not taking success, or we're not taking advantage of here, and I said, I'd love to manage people, and I love to grow teams. Obviously, as an individual seller, I've been very successful. But I've got a lot of skill set, building highly successful sales teams that you're not taking advantage of. And so they asked me to go back into sales management. And I built a team from about four people in the first year, four years later, that team was 300 people all selling cloud, right? We just didn't exist. And and then four years later, there's four 300 people doing about a billion in revenue. And, and so if you look big picture, those 18 years manager up through management ranks not quite VP, but you know, as manager of managers, to an individual contributor, you just never do that successful individual contributor, and then back into management, and then grew a team back to where I was, you know, back in the org, so, you know, more than 100 people. Very unusual to do that. Right. I mean, if you look at the percentage of people at Microsoft that have been manager, individual contributor, back to a group manager, probably less than 1% of the people. Yeah. And, and, to me, one that helped me stay there as long as I did. And two, it created opportunities for me that you sometimes you can't just chase the corporate ladder. You got to do what you're passionate about what you love to do. And sometimes that's not it's not a step backwards, it's just a step in a radically different direction that people Oh, my God, you know, I can't tell you the number of people. So you've ended your career by making this move? And I'm like, maybe, maybe a half? I don't know. But let's see how it turns out. And obviously, it turned out pretty well.

Peter Szczerba - I think what's really powerful about that is, is this idea of, of taking step back to Visual contribution from a point of like, some sort of senior leadership, that's often something that is a consequence, right, of maybe a lack of foresight of lack of performance of whatever the case is. And that's, I think maybe that's where that negative connotation comes from is that, you know, I don't think many people choose to take a step back from that corporate ladder and focus on on getting closer to the work again, right, or making sure that they re insert that passion and love to their job, right. I think that's a really important thing to call out that, like, what you did is you assessed critically like what it is that would make you happy in your role identified, you know, we're going to get that in the direction. What do I like to do? Yeah, exactly. And then and then you, you know, kind of bucked the trend and said it, you know, I'm making this decision, right? I'm not ending career, I'm finding for happiness in a new direction in within my career, right. And then, you know, I paid dividend dividends, because obviously, finding that passion, it was accelerative and you were very good and that drove impact that you were able to deliver impact was immense. And then that impact translates to downstream success again, right and growth opportunity and an ascension. So like, I think, you know, there's a lesson there that like, making sure that you're always taking into account Am I really happy with what I'm doing? And is there other ways for me to be happier with what I'm doing? Because that happiness translates to working hard doing good work delivering impact, which ultimately, generally speaking translates to that success and growth. Right. So like, there's definitely an equation there that that makes a ton of sense. And, you know, you talked a little bit about one of the particular roles there that you had around giving speeches as an evangelist. Right. I think that's a particularly interesting role. I'd love to hear a little bit about that. But also, because the last time we spoke, you use the term I hadn't really heard before, extemporaneous speaking. And, and I, you know, particularly you talked about, like, loving public speaking, that resonates with me, because I find public speaking, so rewarding, and to be so rewarding. And it's thrilling, right? I think I'm okay at it. But obviously, everyone has room to grow. But I'd love to hear about that particular term. And then also that role of kind of being an evangelist and what that entailed and how that type of role exists.

John Weston - Yep. That's great, great question. So this goes way back. It's my older, my sister was a debater. Right then became a lawyer, right? That's kind of a natural progression, that debate in high school equals law degree three years later, or whatever. But I saw her in that debate team, right. And so I went to sign up for middle school, the middle school, I went to wean before high school had a debate team. And there are three different roles you could have. You could be on the debate team, you could be on the pros team, which was basically writing poetry and giving speeches. There was this new kind of thing. It was called extemporaneous speaking. I was a first time eighth grader, I could say I could say, extemporaneous speaking. It's like, what the heck did this, but it was almost, I'm an adrenaline junkie. Right, you know. So, it, it basically, the way extemporaneous speaking works is, you go into the room, they give you a controversial topic, and you have 10 minutes to go away and write a speech, you're allowed to give one three by five card that you can take in there with you and give a speech. And then after those 10 minutes of prep time, you have to give anywhere from a five to seven minute speech. And it and so you have to it's risky, right? I mean, cuz you got fired. What side of this? You know, one of them was, I don't know, should we ban smoking, or, you know, those kind of, you know, aka controversial topics. And, and you have to be able to take risk, you have to take a stand. You have to be able to convey convincing and sell people and convince them on your idea. But it really is impromptu public speaking it. I call it BS on your feet. Yeah, it is, how fast can you research a topic, come up with a perspective and BS on it, and make the BS believable? Right, and tell a story. And so I did it through middle school and continued it into high school. I didn't do it all years in high school, but but I really enjoyed the adrenaline portion of it and got pretty good at it. Because it's it, you know, you think about someone in high school, or in middle school or high school, and standing up and speaking would just freak most people out, right? Yeah. And, and I still today, if I get on stage in front of 500 people or whatever, I get butterflies, and it's taking that nervous energy and focusing it on telling a quality story, and engaging the audience. Right. And, and I learned that very, very early on. So roll that, you know, pass into my career. When I got out of the management job, and the first job I had as an individual contributor, before I got back into sales was this thing called a IT Pro evangelist, right? And oh, my gosh, when you hear in the south, you hear the word evangelist, you immediately have religious connotations, like, yeah, what in the world is a religion job doing in a corporate world, basically, an IT pro evangelist is someone that, that cares about that industry cares about the people in it, and delivers and communicates the Microsoft Message in a number of ways giving speeches in person, so anything from large conferences to user groups, actually, part of my goals one year was to help create user groups and go out there and nurture the community and build more user groups. So it was evangelizing the products, not necessarily selling it, creating a brand. So helping with a marketing activity, you know, back in basic, about 20 years ago, the big tchotchke at events was t shirts, ox or whatever, the you know, the current thing is now but it, you know, one year, we gave away two and a half million T shirts, oh my goodness, you know, and that was, you know, measuring their impact. And then, of course, it was a combination of, of, in person, live events, with, you know, with, you know, nowadays, obviously, you know, webcast and, and, and podcasts like this, that you're kind of a combined world in that whole space. And so, evangelism is really a unique role. And there's still companies that have those roles. You're not in a sales role. You're not in a marketing role, but you're the face if you will, of that brand. And and you give a lot of presentations and a lot of speech. And so, to me, that's a really, really pretty cool role that you have, and you can talk All the way back to the simple rainiest speaking that I didn't middle, not up on stage to talk to people.

Peter Szczerba - I absolutely love that because you know me personally, five, six years ago now I jumped into the world of Toastmasters which I'm sure is familiar organism's people. And then you know, before you know, I was very relatively early in my career, and I just saw it as a let's let's sharpen this skill set. Let's make it elite, right, let's let's become a really, really strong and talented public speaker. But very quickly, what I realized, like I that I was getting the most value out of was the impromptu speaking to Table Topics, this idea of picking up a topic reading it and building a structured speech about it whether you know, a damn thing about it or not. Right. And that's exactly what you described with this term of extemporaneous speaking. And to me, I think what that develops, is the ability to, for for the ability for that sort of on your toes speaking and being a navigated conversation or presentation, to become second nature and instinctual. So that way, when you're actually in that situation, and you do know something about the topic, yeah, well, the focus on that more than having to do the navigation, the navigation is instinctual. Now, suddenly, you're that much more powerful, you're two steps ahead, because you can focus on the information, the solution or whatever the problem is, right. And I think that's a really powerful thing to, for people to understand that when you can practice the skill set of being good on your feet with the actual speaking right, and crafting the story with your words, then that becomes, you know, second nature and you don't have to worry about that part anymore. Now, just worry about the problem. You're trying to solve the thing you're trying to influence.

John Weston - Yes, a couple. That reminds me of a couple of great stories. One is, when somebody thinks they want to be an evangelist, the first thing I recommend is go go join Toastmasters for six months, right? And then come back in that and tell me whether or not you want to be an evangelist or not, right. And it also the interview process. One time we interviewed a guy on paper resume, great in the interview, great, perfect candidate we hired him. He went to give his first speech, he stands up in front of 100 people in the room and he locked up away. It just literally froze and ran out of the room and said, I can't do this job, cheese. And we didn't know that through the interview process. And so what we didn't change was our interview process. We said okay, I'm come to the interview, you're going to give a seven to 10 minute speech sheet very similar to Toastmasters. Right? And, and we're going to try to trip you up, right? Really the minute we would bring four or five people in a room and try to stump them try to, you know, make their projector break or ask them some bizarre question to try to see if they get flustered in a in a high pressure situation like that. And you'd be amazed at what people and they could talk about whatever topic they wanted, it didn't have to be technical or not. But you'd be amazed at how you really get to see people perform, when they have to give a presentation, if they're, if they're good at that or not, or if they're comfortable speaking, as you say, just standing up and making a presentation because that's not for everybody. Not everyone understands how to channel that nervous energy. And, and, and thrive in that environment. And that's okay, not everybody has to do that. You know, it's it's a little bit of the Taipei extroverts versus the introverts. You know, an introvert is going to hate having to do that. Some introverts are good at it, but it just, you know, typically, you know, an extrovert type A personality is going to go to thrive more in that environment.

Peter Szczerba - Yeah, for sure. For sure. And I do think, again, like that, just as a skill set, even if you are an extrovert working on it, to sharpen it, if you are an introvert, working on it to develop it is such an important thing. And I think such a big differentiator and contributor to growth throughout a career and even personally.

John Weston - I will tell you one of my secrets on a big one, right? Quick forward change. Yeah. My nervousness is is directly proportional to the number of the people in the audience know Evan launch had 5000 People in the Dallas and my parents were, were there. The nerve, the butterflies in my stomach, don't eat right before you present. Right, right. But you have to channel that so I'm, let's say in the greenroom, about to go on stage in 10 minutes. I'm actually humming the theme to Rocky to myself that I can do this. Amazing. Right. And I have to remind myself, okay, now you're on stage. Stop singing Rocky. Yeah. And just deliver it. You've got this right and, and in that I also coached entrepreneurs, right. So when you're done that you've been going on adrenaline for that entire time. You haven't eaten anything. The first thing you should do after giving a speech is go eat something and get up and go get calm for a little bit. Don't try to drive don't try to go do some productive work just as you get about two hours. That is gonna physically take your body to recover after giving?

Peter Szczerba - Definitely, definitely is taxing I, you know, I 100% agree. And there's that kind of adrenaline exhalation right afterwards. You know, it's like coming off of like a championship game, or something like that. And you're just exhausted physically, also, because you know, whether it went well or not like, yeah. No second guessing that kind of well, no, you know, right.

John Weston - People I actually talked and had a conversation with 10 people in that room, and I talked to the same 10 people. The other 4980 just enjoyed listening to the conversation.

Peter Szczerba - Exactly, no, I love that man. I mean, this skill set the entrepreneurial aspect to the, the Navigating Your career the way you did, and kind of the confidence to be able to take step back to take two steps forward, all of that, to me is conducive to a really like strong set of skills that that can be employed by a leader. And I know in talking with you previously, that leadership is something that you're really passionate about. Talk a little bit about your view on leadership and why it's so important to you.

John Weston - Yeah, um, first off, leadership does not equal manager, right, right, or coach, those are all three very distinct roles and capabilities. I learned very early on that, regardless of what I'm going to be in, whether it's an organization, a homeowner's association, X, you know, athletic, active, whatever it is, I'm going to be a leader in that organization, it just is hard for me. First off, it's hard for me to watch poor leadership, right? And leadership is not authority, right? I mean, I don't have to be a manager or VP, to be a leader, I can be a leader as any role in a team, right? individual contributors can be leaders all day long. And here's my take on this a little bit different. I firmly believe that the leadership gene is genetic. I have four kids, I see leadership in all four of them. And and my coaching to my kids is embraced that leadership, right? Use it to your advantage. We can't stand seeing poor leadership. And so you've got to contribute by being leader does that mean you have to run the place? No. But you can lead people and see the vision, you know, leadership's all about, there's a goal, there's a target, there's a flag, let's go capture that and helping people see the vision on how to get there, you don't have to be the manager, you don't have to be the head of the group. But right, you can help be a visionary to say, look, this is the future, this is the direction we go, this is the solution, and help people understand how they get there. Right? How did what is their journey to that place individually, um, you can do is as an individual contributor in any organization, and, and I see to my kids all day long, I see it in their college careers. I see it in their, their athletic organizations that they're part of, and they've, they've definitely have embraced that now. Now. Can you learn leadership? Absolutely. Right. But I do believe some people have it in their DNA, that they're not necessarily born leaders. But the key is you have to understand how to embrace that, how to take advantage of your non accepting of mediocre mediocrity, and and that you want to help everyone do better as a group. It's all about teamwork, right? It's about us as a group of whatever, being at work a team, we as a group together can do more than just individuals. And, and helping people see that vision. And it's just amazing to see that in my kids. Right. I mean, obviously, that's helped me throughout my career. You know, I view myself as a leader, regardless of my role, and, and I want to help people. You know, Simon Sinek has several philosophies about AI as a book called leaders eat last, right? In the military, why does the general eat the last he's taking care of his people, making sure they all eat first, and he's still if there's any food left over, the leaders eat? Right, right. It's all about taking care of the earning trust with the people that you're in an organization with. And, and, and you can lead regardless, I do think a manager should be somewhat of a leader, because they need to be able to take care of the people and earn that trust. So it's important to attribute of a leader but just because you're someone's manager, doesn't mean you're the leader. Right. And you can lead from any position.

Peter Szczerba - Yeah, I think that's really important. And I think this idea that, you know, you can be born with that leadership gene, but then you have to recognize that embrace it, nurture it, grow it, right. Absolutely. And also, if you're not born with it, that's okay. You know, I acknowledge that it doesn't come naturally to you. And then same thing as same as public speaking, work on it, develop it and do it to the best of your ability and.

John Weston - We need to start a Toastmaster Leadership.

Peter Szczerba - That's right. And so what's, you know, and I think the important thing there is like understanding that if your role was to be a leader, then that's your role in the team. Right? Absolutely. But there's a ton of different roles that we can play. And so acknowledging or realizing what that role is for yourself. And if it is naturally to lead, well then embrace that. And I think, you know, I think that's a really powerful sentiment and something that that will probably resonate with, with a lot of people. John, this has been a fantastic conversation. I think there's just so much value for people to get out of out of listening to this. I just really want to thank you for your time. It is a great sentiment for us to leave off on this time. And I would love in the future if we could reconnect and kind of see where you're at and kind of what new challenges and impact you're trying to overcome and drive.

John Weston - Thanks, Peter. Yeah, I'd love to do it. I appreciate the opportunity.