CIO Exchange Podcast

The New Needs of the Workforce - with Saket Srivastava, CIO of Asana

Episode Summary

Saket Srivastava is the CIO of Asana, a software company that helps teams orchestrate and organize their work. Saket is an experienced IT leader. In this episode of the CIO Exchange, Saket explains the realities of adapting your workforce and office environment in a post-pandemic world.

Episode Notes

It’s difficult to create the right operating model in a post-pandemic work environment. Whether your workforce is remote, hybrid, or in-person, teams need the right structure and security to work efficiently. 

Saket Srivastava is the CIO of Asana, a software company that helps teams orchestrate and organize their work. In this episode, Saket explains the realities of today’s shifting office environment and describes the complexities of delivering the needed tools and experiences to different workforces. He emphasizes the importance of empowering your employee base and creating opportunities to be together, no matter where your team works from. Saket says that, no matter what, your employees need a space to do deep work and have the tools and platforms to help them do it well. 

Multi-Cloud briefing: “Navigate Economic Headwinds with a Cloud-Smart Approach.” 

https://blogs.vmware.com/multi-cloud/2023/03/21/vmware-april-2023-multi-cloud-briefing/   

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Key Quotes:

“Whatever vision you take, whether you decide to go fully remote, whether you try to be a hybrid workforce, or all in-office, you'll never be in a situation where everyone's gonna love the vision. It's not a consensus based vision. But the bigger challenge ends up being when you have not taken the company along in this journey. What are the reasons, the first principles against which you are making a decision on how you want to operate? Everything that follows after that has to support that vision.

“Technology can only take you so far. There's a whole lot of innovation that cropped up even before the pandemic, and obviously through the pandemic. But that human connection is just so important. If you've been in a place where you've kept most of your workforce remote, it's still very important to find opportunities to get people together.”

“As a CIO, what's important to me and my organization is how we create experiences for people where they can do their deep work when they need to do the deep work. And then provide them with tools and platforms to engage with teams and with people in the most productive way.”

“The way I think of security? Security is everyone's problem. Whether you're a security company or not. It's for every employee in the organization to understand that  they have a role to play in making sure that the company is secure.”

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Time stamps:

03:05 The challenge of adapting your workforce model

06:45 Setting up a successful working model

08:40 Keeping human connection strong in a digital world

12:20 Creating a positive employee experience

16:33 Maintaining a secure workforce

19:21 Keeping safe tools in, dangerous tools out

22:15 The value of curiosity

27:10 Having an empathetic conversation with the board

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Links:

GUEST on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saket-srivastava-84069711/

CIO Exchange on Twitter: https://twitter.com/vmwcioexchange
Yadin Porter de León on Twitter: https://twitter.com/porterdeleon 

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Episode Transcription

0:00:00.0 Saket Srivastava: Whatever decision you take. Whether you'll decide to go fully remote, whether you try to be a hybrid, office-centric hybrid workforce or all in-office, you'll never be in a situation where in everyone's gonna love the decision, right? It's not a consensus based decision, but the bigger challenge ends up being when you have not taken the company along in this journey on what are the reasons, what are the first principles against which you are making a vision on how as a company you want to operate. And then everything that sort of follows after that has to support that vision.

0:00:37.0 Yadin Porter De Leon: Welcome to the CIO Exchange Podcast, where we talk about what's working, what's not and what's next. Yadin Porter de Leon, finding the right operating model in a post-pandemic world environment is challenging, as technology leaders have quickly discovered the needs of their workforce are complex and can vary significantly from those in other companies, whether your workforce is remote, hybrid or in-person, teams need the proper structure and security to work effectively. Saket Srivastava is the CIO Asana, a software company that helps teams orchestrate and organize their work.

0:01:10.4 Yadin Porter De Leon: In this episode, Saket explains the realities of today's shifting office environment and describe the complexity of delivering the needed tools and experiences to different workforces. Saket's role at a Asana gives him a combination of two unique perspectives, that of a CIO looking to enable his own teams, and that of a technologist that produces tools to enable teams and a diverse collection of companies all around the world. He emphasizes the importance of empowering our employees based on creating opportunities to be together no matter where your team works from, Saket says that no matter what, your employees in a space to do deep work and have the tools and platforms to help them do it well.

0:01:50.9 Yadin Porter De Leon: Also, looking ahead, we've got many great episodes coming up, including topics like generative AI and Platform Engineering. So, continue to stay connected to the podcast. We also have some great video content, just recently we launched the latest a Multi-Cloud briefing titled navigate economic headwinds with a cloud smart approach. This briefing focuses on helping multi-cloud IT organizations succeed in today's challenging macro-economic environment, not only to survive the economic storm, but to emerge from it even stronger. Look for the link in the show notes.

0:02:26.1 Yadin Porter De Leon: Now, there's a lot of hype and a lot of discussion around hybrid work, mobile work, various different workflows and different ways that companies are doing, and people are starting to realize that it's not simple. Hybrid work seems like a simple thing, but it's not. There are very different use cases, very different edge cases in each CIO and each company, and the leaders in each company are handling this differently because their needs are different. So you're in a unique position where you seeing some of the biggest challenges that companies are facing when they're trying to adapt their workforce model in their operations to this world that's changing this workforce that's changing.

0:03:00.1 Saket Srivastava: Well, great question, I totally agree with you. It's not a problem that one, has been solved, or it's not a problem that has an easy answer, that's clearly not one answer that sort of fits for all sorts of problems. I have a sort of interesting perspective on this because when the pandemic started, I was at another company, I was at a FinTech company called Square now Block. And the approach we had taken for workforce and future of work and hybrid workforce was very different from where I am now, which is at Asana, and our perspective on where people work from and the future of workforce is slightly different. So, it's interesting. These are two different models where at Square, even before the pandemic Jack Dorsey and we all decided that we want to be a remote first company. We want to get people the flexibility to come in when they need to, but otherwise they can work from where they want to, wherever they feel that they're creative best.

0:03:50.1 Saket Srivastava: At Asana, this was a little bit before my time here, but at the start of the pandemic itself. Asana had made addition that, yes, obviously through the pandemic, people are gonna work remotely, but once the pandemic is over, we're gonna ask people to come back in some shape or form. And what I think was interesting in both of these cases was a thoughtful top-down point of view on how do we want to think about the future of work? It's something that I think companies who are struggling more, companies who've sort of meandered around this problem that we'll see how it plays out, and that becomes in my opinion, a little more troublesome. Whatever decision you take, whether you would decide to go fully remote, whether you try to be a hybrid office-centric, hybrid workforce or all in office, you'll never be in a situation where everyone's gonna love the decision.

0:04:40.0 Saket Srivastava: It's not a consensus based decision, but the bigger challenges ends up being when you have not taken the company along in this journey on what are the reasons. What are the first principles against which you are making decision on how as a company, you want to operate. And then everything that sort of follows after that has to support that vision. And then that could be hiring if you decided to be sort of in and around your office and in a office-centric hybrid environment, make sure that they're hiring practices through the pandemic, make sure that candidates were being told that, "You've got to come back." That's where we decided to sort of open up the talent pool and just hire people from all across the geography. So, those are important considerations that resulted from that initial point of field of how do you want to think about that future of firm? 

0:05:32.9 Yadin Porter De Leon: No, I think one of the key parts is that thoughtful approach and making sure that you find reasons why you're gonna be doing each of these things, or the who's it for, and what's it for? And how do you know if it's working? I think that model really applies especially to this hybrid workforce, and I think a lot of individuals, especially technology leaders, have thought throughout the last three or four years, they feel like they've taken an approach of thoughtful organization, technology tools, but at the same time they're starting to find some of these issues crop up. And so when you say, I'm sure everyone thinks they've got a great strategy, or what's our hybrid work strategy everyone can articulate that, but where do you feel like you're seeing some things getting missed? 

0:06:13.9 Saket Srivastava: Yeah, the way I sort of think about this is, it's important that one stays curious, one keeps their ear to the ground to listen what's working, what's not working. And when things are not working, it's totally fine to sort of acknowledge that and sort of work around what to do to make it work, technology can only take you so far. There's a whole lot of innovation that sort of cropped up even before the pandemic, and obviously through the pandemic certainly help, but that human connection is just so important that if you've been in a place where you've kept most of your workforce remote, it's still very important to find opportunities to get people together.

0:06:52.3 Saket Srivastava: So at Asana, what we've done is we have landed in this office-centric hybrid environment where three days a week, we ask people to come to work, and two days a week they can work remotely, and that model sort of works well for us. Sure, there are times where we feel that people could be more and more people could be more an office. But I think just being curious and knowing where things are working, when things are not working, not thinking that there's technology is gonna solve all of these problems.

0:07:22.0 Yadin Porter De Leon: And I think one thing that you put a fine point on is that human connection piece, and I think culture is one of the powerful engines by which things get done, and so the technology piece is one thing that can support your intent, support your strategy. But there's also a cultural technology that needs to be able to be developed to adapt to whatever actual physical technology that you're applying on there, and that's something that kind of emerges, what is that cultural... That curve of cultural technology where we build habits, we build culture, we build teams, we build relationships in certain ways. Then you start to see those cultural technology artifacts emerge, how are you looking at applying tools to make sure that human connection is as strong as it possibly can be even when people aren't physically in the same space.

0:08:10.9 Saket Srivastava: We realize rely on some of the same tools that a lot of other companies rely on, we do video conferencing solutions, we've got instant messaging solutions like Slack and stuff as well. What we are really big on even as a company that we focus on a lot is how can we remove that digital friction for people. There's a whole lot of context switching that people are having to do these days, in fact, there's a study that we do at Asana, we call it anatomy of work, there's a survey, and the results of that were pretty interesting that in a day, an average employee works across nine plus applications or tools. So just imagine the kind of context-switching that they're having to do, right? As the CIO what's very important to me and my organization is how are we creating experiences for people, where they can do the deep work when they need to do the deep work. And then provide them with tools and platforms to engage with teams and with people in the most productive way, and when tools can't cut, it can't meet your need, then you find opportunity for teams to come together. It's a combination of all of these options really? 

0:09:17.6 Yadin Porter De Leon: Yeah, and I think there is something you just said there also it fascinated me, and I'll connect that with something you said previously, which is set a expectations when you're hiring, you're creating a workflow around onboarding new people that you're setting expectations and bringing them into this a technology or the hybrid workforce culture in a way that's going to make them productive. Give me your approach for how you're ensuring that that development of that workforce is gonna be capable of doing the context switching, moving from an office to hybrid. Are there tools and process and trainings of onboarding in place to start to fold people into the way that Asana, for example, operates as a hybrid or mobile workforce, and how you pull people in to be able to be effective and be productive starting out in day when they open their laptop and all of a sudden they've got a capability to start to remove some of that friction that you're talking about? 

0:10:10.0 Saket Srivastava: Yeah, in fact, my onboarding with the Asana happened when we remote, still with the realities of COVID. And what I've found being done really well was that onboarding. In fact, even before the onboarding, right from the time the conversation starts as a candidate, we are very explicit about explaining, yes we are a very thoughtful company, but this is what we expect, once the pandemic is over, we would expect people to come. So that clarity is very helpful. It does not help to keep things vague and in a confused state for anyone. And so when the onboarding happens, through their onboarding journey we're telling people how does the company work, which are the ways that people work here, how do decisions get made? How do teams operate? And as part of their onboarding, we surface up the tools and technology that will enable people to do deeper or collaborative work. All of that absolutely is something that we focus on to our onboarding journey as well.

0:11:07.7 Yadin Porter De Leon: Yeah, and I imagine, like you said, technology is one of the pieces, but it's one of many, many pieces, so the onboarding is really important. So communication experience, but then there's also that employee experience once the tools are actually presented to them. What I'd love to dig a little bit deeper into your thoughts on how you're moving that friction when someone's onboarded, that employee experience then becomes everything.

0:11:31.4 Saket Srivastava: As I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of energy and focus that has certainly gone in making this onboarding experience something that obviously one learns and ramps up really fast. But also starts understanding the culture of the place just as quickly as well. And a product is something that we truly believe helps with creating an environment, a place where people can just do work. I look at Asana as a hardware, people can focus on the work, they can create accountability, clarity forward, and then we've got a bunch of integrations across different tools that bring their work in, all with the mindset of how do we reduce that context switching for people and be able to provide people a platform through ways they can do deep work. So, we obviously had no food in our own product through the onboarding journey as well.

0:12:22.9 Yadin Porter De Leon: I'd like to say drinking champagne.

[laughter]

0:12:27.5 Saket Srivastava: That's a better way to put it, yeah, drink your own champagne, but we absolutely focus on that.

0:12:31.0 Yadin Porter De Leon: Yeah, I think that's good because that friction, I think is key, like you mentioned that study too, when people are contact-switching and if you decide, "Okay, I'm gonna sign an enterprise license agreement for some big tool, and it's going to be this. And here's the reasons why we wanna use it." Technology leaders also need to think about what's the cost of that if I need to add something else, and there's gonna be contact switching, there's not the integration that's there, and maybe not the road map that I need the integration to be pulled into whatever other tools I'm using. What's that cost, and if I then put dollars or investments and other tools that are better integrated with less contact switching. Is that going to outweigh any other benefits. I might think if I'm looking at this ELA or subscription license to something else? 

0:13:13.9 Saket Srivastava: And that's where in the CIO role or the organization just has to play such an important role. When we talk about employee experience. Historically, employee experience is something that I believe that people organize in the HR organization had a big role to play in. And today as well, they've got an important role to play, but since a big part of employee experience is informed today by the digital part of that employee experience. The CIO organization has to take and increasing the active role informing what that experience is gonna be like. And that means that we have to have a point of view where in short, we're listening to our stakeholders, and our functions, and the rest of the organization. But we're also informing them that this is how work happens at Asana or for that matter, at any other company that as a CIO organization that's trying to inform this, right? 

0:14:03.3 Saket Srivastava: And it can be necessarily looked at as one tool of one platform, it's gonna be an ecosystem of tools, and it's very important in many ways. Just tell people, this is what you need this tool for, and this is how the workshop flow into this tool or flow out of this tool, but you have to very simply educate people that these are the platforms that we've made decision to invest in and focus on, and this is what you should leverage. And yet be curious, and yet we listening to people and on things that they think are better out there, and then over time sort of favored where need be, but having that informed point of view from the CIO organizations is very important.

0:14:42.7 Yadin Porter De Leon: Yeah. One thing that they're placing this I want to pivot a little bit in conversation too, is making sure that you're having this type of seamless frictionless or reducing the friction as much as you can and these experiences while at the same time, making sure that you've got a secure workforce. And we're not gonna go super deep into security on this, but it's a key thing that keeps leaders up at night and making sure that you, especially when information is coming in and out from the edge all the way back into your cloud, your data center, whatever that is, that information is being treated well. And is that something that when companies are looking at that they should be taking an approach of, well, we're not a security company and we're gonna make sure that we're leveraging the security capabilities of all the other vendors and service providers. How you're balancing those two of, I need to make sure I'm secure compliant, but at the same time security is not the focus of my company, and I need to make sure that I get what I need from the vendors that I'm engaging with? 

0:15:41.0 Saket Srivastava: If I only hold in that simple word that in because security is not my problem, but...

0:15:45.6 Yadin Porter De Leon: Yes, you know the button it says, secure and you just click yes. And then it's secure.

[laughter]

0:15:51.6 Saket Srivastava: Yeah, interesting. The way I think of security is everyone's problem, not just whether you're a security company or not, but not also about just if you're the CSO organization or not. It's for every employee in the organization to understand that they have a role to play in making sure that the company is secure. It's also not okay, to that point for us in the CIO organization to say that, "Because we lean on a bunch of these SaaS providers and vendors, that is their problem." We have to do our due diligence to make sure that they're secure, they're compliant and all of that rigor needs to happen before the process of onboarding any of these vendors, so that duress something that we absolutely need to own and do better.

0:16:36.7 Saket Srivastava: What I think is very important is empowering the organization, the employee base through frequent and creative ways of educating them on our security posture and what are things to look out for, and what a good behavior and what's not good behavior. That is perhaps the most effective way to kind of make sure that you're staying on top of your game from a security standpoint. And then obviously as a security team, you've got to do your table top, your red team, blue team exercises and be at the top game. So those are some things that I and my organization do off and I think everybody should be thinking of.

0:17:12.7 Yadin Porter De Leon: The hardest part of security is making sure that people do the right thing, and it's tough making the right thing to be the easy thing. 'Cause many people want to move fast and break things as we do in Silicon Valley, and that causes certain behaviors like, let me just go and grab this tool or I'm using this tool personally, why don't I just go ahead and jump on this other messaging tool or this file sharing total, 'cause the friction is less, and so you're competing in many cases with some really powerful tools. I think you're in a special place where Asana actually might be one of those tools that people go to simply because I worked with that before, I think it's more seamless, it's more elegant. I've actually personally been in organizations where people have done that, they kind of gone rogue and I'm using that tool instead of this other tool, just because it's more seamless. One of the big challenges is what's been called shadow IT in the past, and really it's just humans not behaving and not following what the guidance they're giving, like you said, this is how we work, this is how we get things done.

0:18:16.5 Saket Srivastava: Yes, and that's the problem that we've seen in the past, and that's a problem that we continue to see quite a bit as well. But a few things that are important, right? We have the judge, the jury here. We are making a decision on your behalf. Sure, we have to have a point of view, but we gotta the organization along in that journey, it's very important to stay close to your employee base, to your different cohorts that you partner with, so that they look at you as a partner, and you can hear of some of the things that they're trying to do sooner rather than later. So there are fewer of those occurrences, there'll still be occurrences where people find fascination with some new shiny toy out there in the market that they want to try it out.

0:18:52.0 Saket Srivastava: But that's also where then you want support from policy, you want to make sure that you are putting in appropriate controls where in you're further reducing any chances of tools being brought into the ecosystem without the right due diligence. You also don't want to always stop all of this, there has to be a level of federated decision making. And you perhaps need to start thinking of creating tiers or classifications where, "Hey, this is Lloris, this is an area where you're not gonna be sharing data or putting in meaningful classified secure data. And so this is Lloris, and so we're gonna make it easy for you. Well, let's still do the basic due diligence from an IT security standpoint, and then we'll let you go on your way."

0:19:36.1 Saket Srivastava: But these are systems of records where in company sensitive data, it's gonna be transacted or stored in, this absolutely requires us to go to the entire process and there we go. So those are a few ways I think you can limit some of this, but net net, the closer you are to your partner organization, where it's a partnership of trust, where they believe that you're listening to them and trying to solve what their needs. People are not out there trying to go and do the wrong thing, it's just when they feel that they have less of a partner and more of a tack office CIO organization that's just gonna force things on them, that's where you see more of the shadow IT crop up.

0:20:14.0 Yadin Porter De Leon: Yeah, when you're not thinking of that employee experience, you're not optimizing an experience, they're like, "Well, I'm just gonna move somewhere else because this is just a terrible experience. I'm not being listened to, I don't feel heard." I mean, It's a classic sort of human behavior, but I think that the tiering thing that you mentioned too, which I think is critical. I think that's sort of a good point in which to address differences in different verticals when it comes to whether or not they can and cannot make certain decisions, or have certain choices when it comes to the flexibility of their workforce. I mean, you've worked across ensuring semiconductors, energy, health care, hospitality, packaging, banking and financial, there is different levels of, like you say, different tiers of sensitive data of regulation and compliance and operating models. Sometimes you need to be physically in a place, sometimes you can be remote. So, when you're looking across verticals, just starting with big buckets, financials versus energies versus consumer package goods, were you seeing some of the opportunities for the technology leaders to change the way that people worked in the past while still making sure that they're accomplishing what they need to as a competitive member in their industry.

0:21:26.0 Saket Srivastava: I think industry a side show, there are some which are more regulated industries, and the sensitivity of data is perhaps gonna be higher than maybe in some other industries, but you've gotta be curious, you gonna learn, you're gonna listen, you got to understand the business of the business and then see how you can be that enabling function and not be looked at as that road block or someone that everyone's seeing you come and then maybe pivoting and going.

[laughter]

0:21:50.5 Yadin Porter De Leon: And as you come down in the hallway and they're like, "Oh, I'm Dan." They just start walking the other direction.

0:21:55.0 Saket Srivastava: What did I run in today? That's the worst case scenario. And so having that sort of partner mindset and wanting to learn what are people trying to solve for, and then helping them find the most efficient best way, educating them along the way that why these are conservation that we're thinking of. It is something that's quite doable.

0:22:18.7 Yadin Porter De Leon: Yeah, I think being curious, that's always a key, I think in a lot of different rules. But especially when you're looking at having a distributed workforce that needs to be able to operate seamlessly and securely, there's always gonna be some new way in order to operate in order to organize that culture and ensure that their expectations are being set so that they'll behave appropriately, which is always the dream. So, I take your point is, despite which vertical you're in, whether you're in healthcare or banking and finance at FinTech, whatever that is, you've gotta have that flexible mindset of what that employee experience is and how you can enable that.

0:22:52.0 Yadin Porter De Leon: Because you said, some leaders are just kind of waiting to see how things unfold, which can create their own challenges. Where are you seeing the workforce evolving because it is, it's not a binary event, there wasn't some day where they came on and said, "Look, everything's over, everyone gets to go back." And then that flip, everyone changed their behavior over several years, that's what it takes for instant change behavior. Where are you seeing that slow evolution happening in the future, you think things starting to harden, starting to solidify in the ways that companies can run and say, "Okay, this is how we're gonna do it now. We can do it this way moving forward." Or do you feel like it's still evolving, still a moving target? 

0:23:29.2 Saket Srivastava: I think as a generational sort of macro shift, things are still sort of on the go a little bit, they're still sort of not fully settled. There are some companies who seem to have landed in a good place, there are some companies that are still sort of figuring the way around. Again, I believe what this sort of shift has brought is that your workforce craves flexibility, and you cannot completely ignore that and force a top-down mandate, yet this is a business that you're running and there are expectations that you have of running this business. So, it's that marriage of allowing for that flexibility and yet creating a highly productive countable workforce that is delivering and answering to their stakeholders and shareholders as well different companies will land in different places.

0:24:21.3 Saket Srivastava: I see that there's an aspect where there's some bit of remote work that's more or less acceptable with different companies, right? There are certain roles that require you to be full-time in office because that's just the way that work can be done, right? But if you are in that either remote hybrid office or a fully remote environment, you still need to consciously find opportunities in a repeated fashion to bring people together. That is just so important and then you can just leave that to chance, you've got to create space, budget, funding, all of that stuff to get people together, that's how people's guards will lower, that's how people teams will start operating at a higher velocity and with greater trust. That's the shift that I'm seeing, and that's where I see the future had continued to head as well.

0:25:10.8 Yadin Porter De Leon: It's very organic, it's changing in different areas in different geographies, I think that the flexibility of curiosity that you're talking about, is what I'm most interested in exploring in that next phase of how this hybrid work is evolving. And so, again, that's a good transition for us to do this and part of the show we call Take it to the board.

0:25:30.3 S3: In short, ladies and gentlemen of the board costs are down, revenues are up, and our stock has never been higher.

0:25:38.7 Yadin Porter De Leon: And if you're having that board level conversation and you're with a board of directors and you got the CEO or the CFO, you're sitting next to them, or you're on the Zoom call remotely. And you're trying to say, "This is the reason why we need to have this sort of flexible strategy, then this is the reason why we shouldn't be having a top-down mandate." And whether that's simply from a employee experience or whether that's sending a signal to Wall Street or however you're operating, whatever that's the externalities of the decision is. How should CIOs and technology leaders be approaching that board level conversation so that the board really understands the importance of that flexibility and the curiosity that you're talking about.

0:26:23.9 Saket Srivastava: The good part is that everyone's going through this journey at the same time.

0:26:27.3 Yadin Porter De Leon: So there's some empathy in there.

0:26:28.9 Saket Srivastava: Yes. There's a lot of empathy in this conversation, also there's a broader understanding that there is no one answer that works right. The conversation the board is really about how do we have a motivated, highly driven, high performing organization. And for that, you've got to be sensitive to employee workforce needs as well, and you also need to make sure that the organization needs to be high performing, so there are certain expectations. Just sort of thinking about from a shareholder-stakeholder perspective and how to create a high-performing team, I think that's what it really bows down to, so it's... I actually don't even think that this is much of a conversation, at least in the board meetings I am in, because the companies that I have been over the last three, four years, we have landed in a place where we feel generally good about how we're approaching this. This is not a decision that you'll have 100% people and everyone on the board agreeing to fully, right? 

0:27:26.9 Saket Srivastava: But this is an informed decision based on these principles, based on what we've heard from people, this is what the landed. And you need to give it time. You need to give it time so that it plays out. Yes, you will continue to sort of keep listening and be curious about it, but it's not something that you can very quickly continue to pave at either, that is the way to think about it. And I believe these are conversations that I would be surprised if there is still a constant with the board, because it's been three years that we've been navigating this now.

0:27:54.9 Yadin Porter De Leon: Yeah, and they should have realized what the situation is and been on board with the direction that you'll need to go as a company and relying on you in many cases to ensure that ship is being steered appropriately. Saket this has been really a great conversation too. I want to see if there's any place you're gonna be speaking, any place online, people can find you, where can people learn, hear see more about you.

0:28:17.4 Saket Srivastava: When not working or spending time with family? Both full-time jobs, LinkedIn, I'm very active on LinkedIn. That's the best way to reach me.

0:28:27.2 Yadin Porter De Leon: Excellent, this has been a fascinating conversation. I appreciate you joining the CIO Exchange Podcast.

0:28:31.8 Saket Srivastava: All right. Thanks a lot Yadin.

0:28:34.0 Yadin Porter De Leon: Thank you for listening to this latest episode. Please consider subscribing to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. And for more insights from technology leaders as well as global research on key topics, visit vmware.com/cio.