Building Your Personal Brand in the Era of Virtual Meetings with Zoom’s Patrick Kelley

Scott Kinka:

Well, hi, and welcome to another episode of the Bridgecast. I’m your host, Scott Kinka, and with me today, I’m super excited about this episode. It is Patrick Kelley, otherwise known as the tattooed nerd. We’re going to get into that. Welcome to the show, Patrick.

Patrick Kelley: 

Thank you. Happy Thursday, Scott. I appreciate you humbly inviting me.

Scott Kinka:

Yeah, well, I like that. So we’ll get into why the tattooed nerd, but you’re, you’re LinkedIn calls you chief tech evangelist, top 50 UCAS influencer, author, several other things, I think importantly, father, friend and donut lover. So before we get into anything, why donut lover? You got to tell me about the donut.

Patrick Kelley:

There was a time and a place where I was a semi-professional powerlifter. I was trying to make weight, and I couldn’t make weight. I was trying to get up to the heavy-weight class, and the only way I could do it was to eat a bunch of junk food, and donuts became my favourite.

Scott Kinka: 

Okay, so you’re obviously fit. You’re not lifting to win awards right now, but you’re still eating donuts and managing to stay trim. What’s going on? What’s the secret?

Patrick Kelley: 

Maybe I could update my LinkedIn profile. I rarely eat donuts anymore.

Scott Kinka: 

All right, so you are Patrick, you know, in a day job. We’ll get into that just quickly. You’re at Zoom now. You’ve been there for five years. Your title is Distinguished Architect. Certainly, they love you getting online and talking about stuff. What does Distinguished Architect mean at Zoom?

Patrick Kelley:

It’s pretty much the coolest title on Zoom. Honestly, I think I accepted the job just for the title alone, but I would believe I was the second distinguished architect hired. Started in March of 2020, right? When the world was falling apart, it was absolute madness. And, so my job is really to help with products, social solutions, engineering, and salespeople. Kind of sit above all that and kind of craziness. Maybe shuffle the checkerboard a little bit and then herd cats, basically.

Scott Kinka:

You work with a friend of mine, Mike Hamilton, too, and your group is right over there. Is he in your group? I believe he’s an architect, also. Something along the lines.

Patrick Kelley:

He is on the global solutions architect team as a technical solutions architect. And he is the man, the myth, the legend about all things chat. He’s an amazing, amazing coworker.

Scott Kinka:

I love it. Well, I’ll make sure I tag him on this. Interestingly, though, you are on the Zoom side. Had two stints at Microsoft. Tell us about that.

Patrick Kelley:

I did. I started at Microsoft, I think, in 2006 as a senior support escalation engineer. Basically, I was a nerd who was in a cubicle and got calls from people who were having problems. Right. And I got tired of that after about three years of just being in the queue. I went to deployment engineering then, and I really wanted to get into sales and pre-sales engineering. But they kept applying for all these Microsoft jobs, and they’re like, well, you don’t have any sales experience. I’m like, I know, but that’s why I’m trying to apply for the job so I can get them. I applied for 38 separate sales and pre-sales engineering jobs at Microsoft. And it was never even given one single interview. And I got a little frustrated. I had a buddy who was working at a company called SPS at the time. They’re now actually Converge One, but he’s like, hey, they’re looking for solutions architects that are pre-sales and engineering and write SOWs and all that good stuff. And so I literally left Microsoft, and I spent a year and a half, two years with SPS and lo and behold, I got a ton of sales engineering experience. I applied for this voice TSP or technical solutions professional job at Microsoft. And guess what? I got the interview and I got the job because I have sales experience.

The Tattooed Nerd: Origin and Purpose

Scott Kinka: 

Amen. I love it. So you are uniquely qualified to be talking about, you know, four years at Zoom, 12 years at Microsoft, at Microsoft’s specialty invoice, at least in those last couple of years, three years at Citrix. I mean, it’s quite a resume at this point. You are uniquely qualified to talk about all things collaboration, especially the medium that we’re going through right now over video. I imagine that’s some of the genesis of the tattooed nerd. So, for those of you who don’t know what that is, the tattooed nerd is, you know, effectively Patrick’s alter ego online. He makes videos like this and talks about lots of topics. But what really interests me is the talks that he gives about optimizing the work from home and the video experience and doing things the right way. And we’ve decided that that’s going to be the purpose of our topic. But before we get to that, explain to us the tattooed nerd, how it got started, and what you’re out there doing on a day-to-day basis.

Patrick Kelley: 

It was purely being selfish, Scott. 1000 % being 100 % selfish and, you know, feeding my fragile ego, really all those things that I typically, no, that’s not really true. 

Scott Kinka:

I love it.

Patrick Kelley: 

Zoom works inside of Microsoft Teams. And I was doing them all the time, and they were. The selfish part is actually true. When I first started at Zoom, being at Microsoft for so long, I was doing a lot of these demos on how, actually, they resonated very, very well. But the problem was I was doing like 10, 15 of these meetings a week, and I was getting sick of doing the damn demo, to be honest with you. So I’m like, you know what? There’s gotta be a better way to scale this. And I thought, what better way to just do a video of the demo and then post it on YouTube? Then anytime. Somebody said, Hey, Patrick, can you do that demo? I’m like, no, you can watch the video and send it to your customers, and they can watch it. And if there are questions beyond that, I can do another meeting, but no, I’m tired of doing the demo. So that was my very first YouTube video where I created a Teams and Zoom meeting, and it’s kind of blown up ever since.

Scott Kinka:

Sure. Fantastic. So that’s part of what you do on a day-by-day basis. The rest of the time, you’re engaging with customers. You got quite a setup over there. What’s your superpower?

Patrick Kelley:

My superpower is that I was so technical for so long, and it was one of the things that I transitioned from being a tech geek, right? And the networking team and reading wire shark traces and netmon traces and process tracing, like those, you know, TCP windows, the window size and jumbo frames, all those networking things. But people don’t realize that. Everyone sees an application, right? Everyone sees, Hey, here’s this gooey, pretty interface, but everything in the world relies on that network. And if you truly understand the network, you can truly understand everything above it. So once I transitioned from engineer to sales, I was able to transition the ability to talk to geeks and IT nerds, right? At the data center level, you’re talking to directors and C-level executives and then transitioning that talk track from technical to business solutions. I think that’s my superpower to be able to really translate that conversation from geek to executive.

Best Practices for Online Meetings

Scott Kinka: 

So, we’re going to have some fun translating conversations from a geek to an executive for the remainder of this episode. And we’re going to have some real fun doing it. You and I talked at our pre-show. We decided we were going to do something different. I mean, you’re an influencer on all things UCAS collaboration. You’ve got to focus on Zoom and Teams. Certainly, with the tattooed nerd brand, you’re not exclusively focusing on Zoom, which I love, right? Even though they’re your employer. Like, you know, the world is in a handful of platforms, but those are certainly Paramount among them. We want to do something a little bit different, and we want to talk about best practices for online meetings. And if we get there, maybe we can expand it into the broad-based, you know, more broad-based communication online topic. But you started in 2020, and everything changed in 2020. We get it. People are at home. Hybrid work is the way that we’re going to work. Different CEOs feel differently about it. But either way, you spend most of your time, even if you’re in the office, on meetings like this one. So I’m gonna start with just a fun question. What drives you crazy? Man, what’s the number one mistake you’re seeing people make when they’re doing this?

Patrick Kelley: 

I’m going to show you the number one mistake that people make doing this. Watch this.

Scott Kinka: 

Oh boy, here we go. Yep.

Patrick Kelley: 

This is the number one mistake everyone makes. You look like Billy talking to his grandmother, right? And sit at the kitchen table. This is the number one mistake, and it’s the most easily corrected mistake. You were sitting at a third level, right? There’s a rule called the rule of two-thirds. Now you’re getting a little conscious right now. Get up there. Look at the Mona Lisa. 

Scott Kinka: 

Yeah, exactly. I’m making me think about it.

Patrick Kelley:

The Mona Lisa is at the two-thirds level. Your eyes should be at the two-thirds level. You can easily correct it right there. That’s as easy as it is right there. 100%.

Scott Kinka: 

That’s just posture and really where your kind of camera sits. All right. Well, then, let’s take that hot. And maybe it’s the same answer, or maybe find me another one then. So maybe it’s the number two, but if that’s the number one problem, what’s the number one piece of advice that you have other than getting your eyeballs at the two-thirds level?

Patrick Kelley:

The number one, the most. I know we’re on a video call right now, but the number one most important thing in your video call is your audio. It is the number one most important thing. I could look amazing, but if I sound like I’m in a tunnel or in a well, everyone loses interest and loses focus and loses attention. Your audio is the number one thing you can easily correct. Now granted, You and I both have some XLR dynamic microphones. I’m not expecting it. I got the Logitech Blue Sona right now, but I have a Sennheiser shotgun mic. I have XLR microphones because I obviously do this for a living. I’m not expecting you right as your sale as an account executive to be on meetings with an XLR microphone with a road boom. I’m not expecting that, but what I am expecting. I’ll show you this again.

Scott Kinka: 

Yeah. What do you use in there? Is that a Shure SM? You got the Logitech, and I got you. Yep. Okay.

Patrick Kelley: 

This USB microphone costs $39 on Amazon and sounds amazing. I expect you to put at least a little bit of effort into making your audio sound good. $39 is not a lot of money to sound amazing.

Scott Kinka: 

Yeah. It worked well. Yeah. So number one, the embedded microphone on your solution is not qualified to actually, even for meetings, you don’t need to be doing broadcast. I get that, and we’ll get into it a little bit more. What’s the name of that $39 mic, by the way?

Patrick Kelley:

Horrible. This is the Maona; I bought it on Amazon. I literally bought it on Amazon for that. And I actually used that mic for probably three years and love it. I recorded hundreds of videos using that mic alone. And I upgraded to an XLR, obviously, as I got more into social and content creation, but that thing will do you an amazing amount of wonders.

Scott Kinka:

It’s that they don’t need an audio interface. They don’t need to go buy a Scarlett. They don’t need to be worn, but with a good USB mic, they can get close to the mouth where the quality is good and makes a perfect amount of sense. We’re going to talk about some of the other technical aspects in a minute. Video, lighting, things of that nature. Let’s just take a step up, though, for a minute. This is maybe a little bit of a controversial topic. So, I’m curious to get your take. I have operated, and I’ve said to CIOs who don’t always love me saying it, to be perfectly honest, but if they’re going to support hybrid work as a primary means of working and they are not housing employees, that it is part of their responsibility to ensure that their employees have the items that they need to look good, sound good online, if you will, whether that’s camera, microphone, lighting, what have you. What’s your feel on that? I’m sure it’s a shared responsibility of caring enough. Do you know if the employer bears some responsibility in this equipment story?

Patrick Kelley: 

I 100 % percent think they do because you’re a reflection of their brand in every single meeting you go to. So why wouldn’t you as a company invest in the quality of not only the presentation of your AEs and your SEs and your entire organization, but it doesn’t take a ton of money to make that infinitely better than just giving you a laptop? And using the laptop camera and mic. Literally could; I could literally outfit somebody with probably less than $150 to make you probably 100 % better. I just told you I would buy everyone a $49 mic. I would buy everyone a $25 diffused LED light from Amazon, and I could spend a hundred bucks on a decent webcam. There’s, that’s a minuscule amount of effort and time and money. You can make everyone look infinitely better. Now, I’m not expecting people to carry this stuff on the road. We’re talking about events in your home office. On the road, it’s a whole other ball game on the

Scott Kinka: 

Sure. Yeah, got it. So two things here. One, I was expecting you were going to be on the road because I know Zoomtopia was this week, which was awesome. I think it just ended, right? That’s amazing. Maybe we unpack that. We’ll see how much time we get at the end of this. But in terms of that package, maybe we’ll talk about it after the show, work together, collaborate, and put some links at the bottom if somebody’s looking for that sub $200 package, whether they’re going to invest in it themselves or invest in it for their employees.

Patrick Kelley: 

That’s correct.

Scott Kinka: 

And I do want to get into lighting in a minute, but before we get there, let me ask you the inverse question. All right. Whether the employer is helping or not. Now, let’s make a note to the employee who’s listening right now. Right? You’re not getting up. You’re not pulling on pants. You’re not gasping in the car and heading to the office. If you’re not making those investments, is it incumbent on the employee to also make some investments in how they look in your mind?

Patrick Kelley: 

100%. I mean, I literally, here’s my morning routine. I get up, have coffee, look at my day, look at my calendar, see what meetings I have. And then I literally, after I take my shower, I know mentally what meetings I have, who they’re with, and what level I need to dress for that day. If I’m in quarterly business review meetings with internal people, I’m wearing a t-shirt all day. I’m not trying to impress you. If I have a podcast, I’m at least putting on a collared shirt, right? If I have an EBC with a high-level Fortune 500 company, I’m probably putting on a dress shirt and maybe a suit coat. Yeah, put a little bit of effort into the situation. I’m not saying dress like that every day. I also follow people on LinkedIn who dress in suits every single day. More power to them. I think you could put just a tiny bit of effort into your audience.

The Importance of Audio and Video Quality

Scott Kinka: 

Got it, got it. Let’s talk about the effort on the employee side or the employer side from a look-and-feel perspective. So we talked a little bit about sound. You mentioned, you know, that’s not that expensive, but the sound on the, you know, that’s on a laptop or on your PC is generally not effective from an input perspective. Let’s talk camera for a minute. Certainly, you can deal with the two-thirds just like how you route the back of your laptop, but talk a little bit about the cameras that come in stock in a lab.

Patrick Kelley: 

Horrible. I mean, they’re absolutely atrocious, right? And again, if you’re at the airport and you got to get to a meeting, I totally understand that, right? But there are three levels of cameras out there that I think you can go with, right? It’s certainly everyone who has a laptop camera, every single one. Never use it. It’s complete garbage to your next level as a decent webcam. We just kind of talked about it, right? I can really get a. I have a 4K, I’m not, well, I can say it, Logitech, I have an MK705, it’s a 4K camera and it is 199 on Amazon. I’m not selling it for Logitech; I’m just saying I own it because it’s amazing. For $199, if you want to go up to the professional level, this is where you start getting to DSLR cameras, right, mirrored or mirrorless. With these cameras today, you can literally hook up directly to your computer with a USB cable, and you can get a 4k experience right to your Zoom meeting. Now, I know Zoom teams and WebEx don’t Broadcast in 4k, but you can tell the difference between 720 and 4k. I guarantee you can be in a meeting, and that makes a big difference if you’re creating any sort of content. If I were any sort of senior executive talking to two investors and VCs, I’d buy a $1,300 DSLR camera to look amazing, to show you the quality and the experience and the effort I’m putting in to be a better, better broadcaster, a better content creator, just a better salesperson.

Scott Kinka: 

Yeah. 100%. You know, and a note I’ll make on that, I think for a lot of people, you know, they don’t realize that the best camera that most of them possess is the one that’s in their pocket, right? Which is the other, yeah, right? Which is the other thing to think about. Mean, there are multiple apps. I use Camo again. I’m not selling for it, but Camo is an app that you can run on your machine. It exposes itself as a camera. You run the Camo app on the Android or the Apple iPhone. You plug it in USB. It sees it.

Patrick Kelley: 

I know what you’re gonna say.

Scott Kinka: 

And I mean, those are fantastic lenses on the backside of those cameras. You probably already have the equipment and could just invest that. You gotta get a good stand so that it’s stable, but you can capture a fantastic image just by sticking your phone in, you know, in the airline mode, if you will, right? Flight mode is used, and then the phone is kept silencing, using it as a camera. That’s another super interesting way. And then lastly, let’s talk about this because I can’t tell you how often this happens. I get somebody who’s at two-thirds; maybe they’ve got a decent camera, maybe there’s even a mic in front of them. And all I see is their background because the ceiling light is back here. It’s lighting the, not lighting the front. Obviously, one simple light can do it, but walk us through that. Like where do you position it? You know, how much do you really need to spend to look good? Or if you don’t have an external light, how do you position yourself by leveraging the lighting that you do have? Just give us a couple of tips there.

Lighting and Background Tips for Video Calls

Patrick Kelley:

Lighting is the number two way to look better, sound better, and feel better when you’re doing a meeting. Number one’s audio, we just talked about that. But lighting can literally make up for a bad camera or make a bad camera better. It’s literally that simple. So I’ve, can, here’s the most simple lighting. Open up your laptop or your monitor and go to Google. Guess what? The whole page is all white. It is a built-in light from your monitor. That’s like the minimum amount of effort you can do to make your lighting better. That’s the most simple tip you can possibly do. If you have multiple monitors, turn them all white. Now, is that practical? Probably not. You’re probably presenting something, or you’re looking at an application. I’m just saying it’s an option. So, the minimum amount you can do is by what we call a key light. It is your main light source. 

Scott Kinka: 

Great tip. Fantastic.

Patrick Kelley: 

And again, you can get these for 25, $50, a diffused LED. That’s the minimum that you should do, which is a diffuse LED. You don’t want those harsh LEDs, right? You want a diffuse LED so it kind of warms and surrounds your overall face. And a lot of times, a lot of people just put them right in front of you, and you can be fine. But then to the next, if you want to go to the next level, right? You want to go with a key light, which is kind of off to the side; a 45-degree angle kind of creates these cinematic shadows on your face. Now we’re getting Hollywood. This is a professional level. You don’t have to do this, you know, as a regular user, but if you want to, you can put a diffuse light on your 45-degree angle, and then they can do what they call a key light at your other 45-degree angle to fill these shadows. For example, I have a key light right here at 45, and I have a fill light at 45. I’ll actually turn it off right now. You can see that as soon as I turned it off, I had a lot more shadows on my face, right? And I’ll turn it back on. And now you can see those shadows fill. This is getting to another level, right? I totally understand. So key light, fill light. And then, if you want to go to the next Hollywood level, it is what they call a rim light, which is the light opposite of what your key light is. And you can see how my hair and shoulders are outlined right here. It adds some depth and dimension to the overall video. So there are three lights in my office right now that I have on. But again. This is upper professional level content creation level stuff. If you, again, are a senior-level executive or you’re a high-level salesperson and you win meetings all the time with partners and vendors or external people you’re trying to sell to, why wouldn’t you invest in looking your best? I don’t get it.

Scott Kinka:

Sure. Completely. So that brings me to, you know, you’re lit very well. Obviously, your background is darkened, and you’ve got kind of professional lighting on that background. That’s a lot for most people, but I want to ask you a semi-controversial question. How do you feel about the phenomenon of virtual background?

Patrick Kelley:

Man, this is a tricky topic because I worked for Microsoft, and I’ve worked for Zoom, and they push that as much as anybody. It’s super cool, right? You can create these branded backgrounds and put logos. Totally understand if if you’re at the airport and you don’t want anybody to know, or you’re in an office that has a boring background, you want to put a virtual background out there. I totally understand the use case for using virtual backgrounds, but I’ll put the button there. If you’re in your home office, why wouldn’t you put some effort into making your real background amazing? You’re there all the time. You’re doing meetings there all the time. You can make your personal background in your office a part of your personal brand. And as soon as you get on a call, People might say, hey, that’s a motorcycle back there. I love motorcycles. Let’s talk about motorcycles. Or you might have a football from a team that you like. I don’t care. Make it whoever you are. Make it a part of who you are as a person. Right, exactly. Your background as well. Put a book up there that you want to talk about. What happens is when you join meetings, I see this all the time, you join meetings, there might be a CFO or a CIO that’s, you know, might be like, my God, might be, they might write Harley-Davidson’s. And as soon as they see your Harley-Davidson motorcycle, they’re like, I have something in common with this person, right? They’re doing something that resonates with the person. I only have a conversation topic built in before I even say a word. That’s why I don’t like virtual backgrounds for a home office.

Etiquette in Online Meetings

Scott Kinka: 

Got it. And then, okay, it makes perfect sense. And I get that. I feel the same way. Sometimes, you’re in the hotel lobby. Sometimes, you’re in the hotel, and there’s no way you can situate it where you can’t see the bed in the hotel. I completely understand those situations. But I’m with you. If you’re in your home office, work on the home office. Take a couple of minutes. Show some pride in the workspace. I can also tell you I love the idea you mentioned earlier about getting dressed every day. I’m very guilty of this. Like I’ll do the, I’ll do the, I’ll go to the gym, and I’ll leave the shirt hanging here in my office. I’ll put the collar on, but underneath them, I really should have gotten a shower before this meeting. There is something mental about saying you’re getting up and you’re going to work. Even if going to work is snagging the coffee in the kitchen and walking into your workspace. Before we get to some fun questions, I have to ask you one last one. And this is not a technical one. It’s about etiquette. What mistakes do you see people make from an etiquette perspective when they’re in online meetings?

Patrick Kelley: 

Here’s another one as well. One, I hate it when you’re late. Like, I absolutely hate it when you’re late. I absolutely hate that. You know what? That’s, and that’s a simple one. But also, and this is sales 101. It’s one of my biggest etiquettes is that when you throw out a question in a virtual meeting, you have to wait for a time for an answer. Instead of just, cause what’s going to happen is you’re going to have four or five people talk at the same time because you didn’t maybe direct the answer, the question to who you wanted to answer. I don’t like that either. Also, don’t like it when you don’t; this is where you’re going to be on a hot topic. I hate it when you don’t prepare for a meeting. And what I mean is this, and everyone’s guilty. We’re all, we’re all guilty. Everyone thinks they can just get, Hey, I got a brand new deck from marketing. Got a brand new deck. I’m going to look at it for a couple of minutes before the meeting, right? I’m going to scan it and scan the deck. And then I’m going maybe look at the bullet points, and you’re like, I know this stuff. And then you think you can present that deck in a professional, perfect way. You will 100 % fail. That’s just what’s going to happen. You will not prepare because you didn’t put the time and effort into presenting an amazing deck. And what that means is that it’s not just reading the bullet points or just talking about them. It’s literally creating an entire script for your presentation. And I don’t mean an hour long. I’m talking about five 10-minute, 15-minute pitches that you have. You better script that entire thing, and you’d better have some sort of, I’m not saying teleprompter, but I don’t care if you use notepad and you put the notepad application right underneath your camera and you read that script, but now you have to read the script like you’re not reading the script. And guess what? That takes an amazing amount of practice, but this is your job. You should be doing this all the time. I can read a script, and no one knows because, again, I put the practice in, I wrote the script, I practiced the script. I really recorded myself giving the pitch and then obviously looked at myself and said, hey, there’s some tweaks I need to make. If I were a salesman, I’m not, right? I’m not as, well, I’m kind of. We’re all in sales, so let’s be honest with you. But I’m not; I don’t have a commission built on my number, so every time on camera, every single video, I do 100 % script.

Scott Kinka: 

That’s tremendous advice. And I definitely agree with you about the preparation. I think the other one is for me, and I’m guilty of this, particularly in internal meetings all the time. It is the people who have the two monitors and are using the camera on the one monitor. So, it looks like you’re not paying attention to the entire meeting. Do you know what I mean? I mean, obviously, in this kind of environment, we’re set to try to, but I mean, that’s just an absolute tip. You know, I’ve told people to take a Post-It note, draw an arrow on it, and stick it next to the camera on their laptop so that they’re just forced to continue looking at the top of the monitor. You know, the other one, know, if you’re, take your zoom, and you can adjust where the other people are in your layout. Put it at, if you have to use the camera on the laptop, put the people that you’re talking to on the top of the content so that you’re forced to kind of look at them as you’re going through whatever the content is. Simple things like that that keep you at least looking engaged with the camera.

Patrick Kelley: 

Yeah, it’s a good one.

Future Predictions and Lessons in Leadership

Scott Kinka:

And I’m the worst at it in internal meetings. My people are probably watching this right now, and this guy worries about that. No, I love that, Patrick. This has been super amazing. I’m sure we could go for another 20 minutes on this. Want to, I want to get, maybe we will do a follow-up at another time, but I want to get a couple of fun questions out, if you don’t mind.

Patrick Kelley: 

What a hypocrite. Okay, let me take a drink of kombucha.

Scott Kinka: 

That’s what, so the first one’s an easy one. It doesn’t need to be in any category in particular; it’s just something for us to look back on later. 12 to 18 months, I need a shameless prediction. It doesn’t need to be technology. We try to stay away from religion and politics, but if you feel strongly, fire it in. Sports, whatever, but give me something we can look back on and see how right you are.

Patrick Kelley: 

Wow, this might be a little hairy. In eighteen months, AI will be a commodity, and we won’t be talking to anybody.

Scott Kinka: 

I love that one because it’s usually the other prediction I get in 18 months: AI will run the world, and the robots will have taken over. I will have the robots taking over the universe question in a minute. Let me give you a business one. I got to pick which one. All right. What’s the most recent leadership lesson that you’ve learned that you really wish you knew when you got started?

Patrick Kelley: 

Wow. That could really, and I’m not doing this to suck up. I promise you. I really do not. But my current boss, Leo Bolton, probably leads by example more than any leader I’ve ever had in my entire career. And when I say lead by example, I’m not saying delegate services and, and, and rah-rah type of person. It’s literally, hey, I have a question on this deck, and he’ll get on the horn with you on a video call and a Zoom meeting and really will work through the deck personally with you. That is true leadership to me, and you can literally put the effort in because you’re caring for your users and your employees. I didn’t, and I haven’t had that much in my career. Even at Microsoft, I was on the road as a consultant. I was a data center engineer. My managers didn’t have the wherewithal or the knowledge to actually help me out. And so that truly leading by example can’t be more true. It’s 100 % something I haven’t had until I was 53 years old. And I honestly don’t know how I survived all the time without it.

Scott Kinka: 

Yeah. It’s kind of like a service mindset, servant leadership in a lot of ways, right? It sounds like I’m hearing you say, which is super interesting. All right. Let’s get back to the robots taking over the universe. Something hap- whatever the dy- our dystopian future descends upon us. And then, I’m not sure if you’re an Apple guy or an Android guy, but you’ve got a phone in your pocket. Only one app continues to work on that phone for the dystopian future. And you get to pick which one. What’s it going to be?

Patrick Kelley: 

Very much so. I think this is the world we live in. Here’s the world we live in today. The world we live in, and we should literally start calling it something else. There’s no such thing as a phone anymore. Can they do phone stuff? Yes. Does anybody use it for phone stuff? No, no, not one person uses it for phone stuff. When I started in this world, I was in the UCAS world. Here’s what UCAS meant to me. Unified collaboration as a service wasn’t even a term, but let’s just go back to 1995. Here’s what UCAS was. It was a hard phone, a PSTN phone and email. That’s what UCAS was. Today, those are the least used modalities in any collaboration communication system. The least used and the most used are video, audio, and chat. Those are the most used, and chat is the number one thing. So, It’s a long, long answer to the only app that you could possibly need on your phone today is SMS. That’s what you need. That’s how we communicate today from a consumer level and enterprise level enterprise. Sit in team chat, right? We sit in team chat all day long or Zoom team chat or WebEx jabber, pick whatever slack, whatever application you want to use. Most of the day, you’re chatting with individuals with channels. That’s your professional day. Most of your consumer day. It’s probably texting your friends, getting a honeydew list from your wife or telling your kids to take out the trash. That’s just how we communicate today. So that’s my one app.

Scott Kinka: 

You know, there were a couple of questions I would have loved to have gotten to, and maybe we could do it in another session at some point, but it does bring up the question. One of the things that I find super interesting is, you know, people talk about it, and there are so many modalities now. The advice I give to IT leaders is that they probably need to make some decisions and set some expectations around the frequency of their work. Return time on communications across modalities because generationally, you know, I still get emails from people where they go; I sent you an email five minutes ago. And I’m like, it’s a mail. Like mail means it comes at posts. I send something back. You see it. Like, I’m not expecting to respond to your email in five minutes. Chat may be a little bit more immediate. You hit me with a phone call. Totally different story. However, the challenge is that each generation looks at it a little bit differently. So you get these sorts of cycles inside the company. That’s probably a whole other episode, Patrick. So we’ll save that conversation. Maybe we’ll continue that on.

Patrick Kelley:

I have a good answer for it, too, when we could talk again.

Scott Kinka: 

Can you make it? Give me the teaser. Give me the teaser answer. Yep.

Patrick Kelley: 

There are five generations in the workforce today. Every one of those five generations talks, communicates and collaborates differently. You have to meet them where they sit.

Scott Kinka: 

Okay, I love it. We’ll talk about how to do that maybe the next time we get together. Patrick, this was an unbelievable episode. It was a great 35 minutes of my time. I hope it was for you. I know it will be for our listeners. Thanks so much for joining me here on the Bridgecast.

Patrick Kelley: 

That was the fastest 35 minutes of my week. So thank you, Scott.

Scott Kinka: 

Well, I love it. I’m glad that I could achieve something today. It’s good stuff. Thanks, Patrick. Appreciate everything.