Begin Before You’re Ready: Military Precision Meets Business

[00:00:00] Joel Neeb: We have to be willing to disrupt everything we do in this moment because the sad part of the story is we are all Blockbuster Video today. We all have to figure out how to reinvent ourselves the way Netflix did, or we will become obsolete—and not obsolete to our competitors, but obsolete to some upstart we don’t even know exists right now.

[00:00:21] Intro: Technology has transformed how we live, work, and connect. Behind that change are visionary people with bold ideas. Welcome to the Bridgecast, where host Scott Kinka explores hybrid work, AI, and our evolving future with tech’s brightest minds. Presented by Bridgepointe Technologies, the nation’s leading tech advisory firm. Experience a better way—the Bridgepointe way.

[00:00:56] Scott Kinka: Hi, and welcome to the Bridgecast. We’re thrilled you’re with us today. I’m joined by Joel Neeb, the Chief Transformation and Business Operations Officer at 8×8. For those of you who don’t know, 8×8 is a global leader in cloud communications and contact center solutions. I’m sure we’ll hear more about that from Joel.

Joel is a former US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and F-15 Mission Commander. He brings over a decade of leadership experience from companies like VMware and Afterburner to his current role. He’s an outspoken cancer survivor and author of Survivor’s Obligation. I think most importantly, Joel’s a motivator and a change agent who has shaken up some of the largest tech companies in the world, and I am fired up for this discussion. Joel, welcome to the Bridgecast.

[00:01:40] Joel Neeb: Thanks, Scott. That was a great intro. I appreciate that.

[00:01:42] Scott Kinka: I was going to say, how did I do?

[00:01:44] Joel Neeb: That was fantastic. You nailed them all.

[00:01:46] Scott Kinka: Well, before I get started, I’d like to just start by saying, on behalf of the entire Bridgecast community, thank you for your service.

[00:01:54] Joel Neeb: My privilege.

[00:01:54] Scott Kinka: Amazing. So, Joel, you’ve navigated some high-stakes environments—flying F-15s, negotiating transformation with C-suites—I’m not sure which one’s more dangerous! But before we get into all that, just tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from? Family? Give us the deets.

[00:02:13] Joel Neeb: Yeah. So I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Go Packers! I moved to Texas for middle school and then south of Seattle for high school. I went on to the Air Force Academy for college, and then I’ve lived all over the world through my military travels.

[00:02:30] Scott Kinka: How long were you in the military?

[00:02:32] Joel Neeb: Fifteen years.

[00:02:33] Scott Kinka: Wow. Amazing. I’ve seen in some of your socials and other people’s commentary the nickname “Thor.” You have to give me some context.

[00:02:43] Joel Neeb: So, it’s a call sign. If you remember Top Gun, it’s like Maverick and Goose. Every call sign story has two versions. One is what you tell everybody, and the other one is the really embarrassing one. It has to sound cool, but the “safe for public consumption” story is that I was “the hammer” as an instructor pilot. That’s the boring story where people say, “Okay, Hammer, Thor.”

The real version—which is always something that embarrasses you—is that on my certification ride to become a flight lead (moving from wingman to lead), I was flying with my squadron commander. Everything went great, but I made the very dumb decision to take us through a thunderstorm that was between us and the base on the way home. The good news is I wasn’t struck by lightning. The bad news is he was. My squadron commander’s plane got struck by lightning in the process. And so, Thor got his thunder.

[00:03:50] Scott Kinka: The God of Thunder. I get it! No kidding.

[00:03:52] Joel Neeb: In a bad way. Yeah.

[00:03:54] Scott Kinka: Amazing story. Walk me from the military into tech. How did that transition happen?

[00:04:00] Joel Neeb: I flew 3,000 missions as a fighter pilot and instructor pilot in the United States Air Force. I loved every single moment of it; I had a smile on my face behind the mask on every flight. But while I enjoyed that, my true passion wasn’t just for flying. I only fly maybe once a year now. I did everything I wanted to do in an airplane.

It actually ignited a different passion: transformations. At 22 years old, after graduating from the Air Force Academy, I was thrust into flight school. In a very short period of time, they took a class of 30 of us from driving cars to flying upside down faster than the speed of sound, three feet away from seven other airplanes, within about four months. We reached the top 0.5% of pilots in the world in terms of skill level in that short window.

I thought, “Holy cow. If I could bottle what I just went through—that personal and team transformation—and let that loose on everything else I did in life, we could accomplish anything.” I made a mental note that I wanted to be a part of that for the rest of my life.

[00:05:35] Scott Kinka: So what’s the early lesson in your career that has shaped how you’re leading today?

[00:05:42] Joel Neeb: I think the earliest lesson is that you need to begin before you feel ready. You start with zero flights and no experience, and then suddenly you’re flying solo.

My question to you would be: how many missions do you think you would need before you were comfortable taking off, landing, and doing loops at 400 miles an hour without an instructor?

[00:06:15] Scott Kinka: I couldn’t tell you. 25, 30, 40?

[00:06:18] Joel Neeb: The answer is seven. That’s all we give our students. On the seventh mission, you land, and the instructor gets out. You leave one engine running, they climb down the ladder, and basically say “Good luck.”

I’ll never forget my solo. As he was climbing down, I grabbed his flight suit by the shoulder and yelled over the roar of the engines, “Hey, I don’t feel like I’m ready for this!” He just said, “I know you don’t, but you are.” He wrenched his shoulder out of my grip and walked away. I was alone in the airplane. I took off and I flew it. The secret was, he was right. He had done the things to make sure I was ready. We often get stuck waiting for the “perfect” opportunity, but you have to move before you feel ready.

[00:07:25] Scott Kinka: How does that military precision translate into business operations today?

[00:08:15] Joel Neeb: Every single day in flight school, we brief the mission, we fly it, and then we debrief with a heavy focus on root cause analysis. You never leave a debrief without three specific things you can do better on the next one—the key bottlenecks for success.

Another key aspect is “chair flying.” This hasn’t hit the business world yet, but it should. We only had 60 missions in the air, which is limited. So, at night, I would go home, stick a plunger on the floor, close my eyes, and visualize the entire sortie. I’d visualize every action I was going to take. That act of visualizing success was a determining factor in my performance the next day. If you ask any flight instructor today, the first thing they’ll ask a struggling student is, “Did you chair fly last night?” It’s essentially programming your brain.

[00:10:04] Scott Kinka: Brief, execute, debrief—that sounds a lot like Agile methodology. Is that why you lean into Agile?

[00:10:21] Joel Neeb: Very much so. It was codified as the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) by a fighter pilot in the ’70s. Agile and Scrum were also created by a former fighter pilot, Dr. Sutherland. These themes come from a harsh, zero-room-for-mistakes environment where you eliminate errors methodically.

[00:11:16] Scott Kinka: You’ve written extensively about being a cancer survivor. How has that shaped your leadership?

[00:11:18] Joel Neeb: It was the crossroads of my life. In 2010, I was told I had Stage IV cancer and about 18 months to live. They gave me a 15% chance of surviving five years. It forced me to take stock. I realized I loved being a fighter pilot, but I didn’t want it to be the whole book. If I died at 33, that would have been the entire story.

I decided if I got a second chance, I’d try my hand at the business world. God called my bluff, and I got that second chance. I did the unthinkable: I left the military at 15 years—just five years away from a guaranteed retirement—to become “the dumbest guy in the room” at MBA school.

[00:12:44] Scott Kinka: Eventually, you landed at VMware. What were you focused on there?

[00:13:05] Joel Neeb: Prior to VMware, I joined a consultancy called Afterburner. We led corporate initiatives and execution—unlike McKinsey, which gives you a strategy binder and walks away, we took them to the goal line.

At VMware, I worked out of the Office of the CEO. I actually climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with Pat Gelsinger; he’s a close friend now. Eventually, he said, “You’re getting too expensive as a consultant, come inside and lead these transformations.” We were shifting the operating model from selling products to selling outcomes—moving to a consumption-based SaaS model.

The analogy I use is: we were selling treadmills based on features (incline, screen, speed). The transformation was shifting to, “We’re going to help you win a marathon.” That includes the treadmill, but it also includes the trainer and the 5:00 AM wake-up calls.

[00:15:41] Scott Kinka: So, what are you tasked with transforming at 8×8?

[00:16:03] Joel Neeb: For 25 years, 8×8 has been a leader in “communications plumbing”—a single integrated platform for UC, contact centers, video, and chat. What we’re shifting toward is becoming a “communications intelligence platform.”

When you have AI-ready communications data in one platform—every chat, every call, every customer interaction—those bits and bytes become inputs from which we extract incredible AI-driven insights.

[00:17:32] Scott Kinka: Can you contextualize that for an IT leader? Make the technology real.

[00:17:52] Joel Neeb: We are “Customer Zero” for our own tools. In January, we changed our culture and started recording all of our calls and video conferences. Without inputs, you don’t get insights.

I’ll give you an example from today. I had a few meetings, and with a single click, AI looked at the transcripts and drafted follow-up emails for me. It summarized the meeting, listed next steps for everyone involved, and noted when we’re meeting again. It does in seconds what used to take much longer.

We also use it for Salesforce updates. Everyone in sales dreads opening Salesforce and trying to remember what a call was about. We have an automated way for AI to extract that update and push it directly into the CRM.

[00:20:07] Scott Kinka: Many IT leaders feel like they’re being told to “go get some AI,” but they don’t know what that means. How should they approach this?

[00:20:50] Joel Neeb: I’ll tell you how not to do AI: as a parlor trick. It reminds me of the early internet in the late ’90s. You’d go to Sears.com and see a visitor counter and a dancing banana cursor. It was neat, but it had no business application. That’s what many companies are doing with AI today—checking a box.

To be successful, you have to do three things, and AI is actually the last step:

1. Visualize: Map out your current business procedures (e.g., sending an email or updating Salesforce).
2. Optimize: A lot of processes are convoluted. If you put AI on an inefficient process, you just become inefficient faster. You’re “paving over the cow path.” You have to fix the process first.
3. Automate: Only once the process is optimized do you look for the manual bottlenecks to automate.

Visualize, optimize, automate. In that order.

[00:24:35] Scott Kinka: Traditionally, operational excellence was about cost reduction. Does that definition change in the era of AI?

[00:24:35] Joel Neeb: Yes. If you’re just looking at AI for cost savings or shrinking teams, you’re not thinking big enough. We have to be willing to disrupt ourselves.

Why did Netflix win and Blockbuster didn’t? Blockbuster had the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million in 1999. Even if they had, they probably would have strangled it to protect their brick-and-mortar cash cow. Netflix won because they were willing to disrupt themselves. They started as a DVD logistics company, moved to streaming, and then disrupted themselves again to become a Hollywood production studio.

We are all Blockbuster Video today. We have to figure out how to reinvent ourselves or we will become obsolete—not to our competitors, but to an upstart we haven’t even heard of yet.

[00:27:17] Scott Kinka: How can IT leaders be useful in that transformation?

[00:27:19] Joel Neeb: Use AI as the “burning platform.” If we don’t do this, someone else will. CIOs should focus on building customized internal tools rather than just buying off-the-shelf software.

For example, we wanted a sales simulator—an AI bot that acts like a customer for training. An off-the-shelf version was $200,000. Instead, we trained our own model using our own customer transcripts. Our simulator doesn’t just use generic sales methodologies; it uses actual objections our customers have raised in previous calls. It cost us pennies compared to the market price.

[00:29:05] Scott Kinka: We’re in budget season. Any advice for IT leaders balancing innovation and performance?

[00:30:00] Joel Neeb: This is not the moment for evolutionary change; it’s the moment for revolutionary change. Don’t just change a couple of decimal places on last year’s budget. Think about where you want the company to be in three years—your “Netflix moment”—and work backward from there. It won’t happen overnight, but you need to start moving in that direction now.

[00:30:18] Scott Kinka: What does 8×8 look like in three years?

[00:30:18] Joel Neeb: We will be a platform that gives you every insight you could ask for. You’ll be able to see the “sentiment” of your organization. You’ll see if a team is frustrated or if they’re ignoring a key initiative. Frontline managers will use AI to give customized performance feedback to sales reps, helping them improve every single day, just like a fighter pilot.

We’ll also help companies understand their customers better. Today, I can ask our AI, “What are the top 10 product features customers requested this week?” It rank-orders them based on actual conversations. Then we can brainstorm: “Customers are asking for this feature, but what is the actual problem they are trying to solve?” We’re operating at a level far beyond what most companies can do today.

[00:32:15] Scott Kinka: It’s like taking unstructured spoken data and making it instantly consumable. Who needs a survey when you’re talking to customers every day?

Alright, we’re in the Lightning Round. I need a shameless prediction for the next 12 to 18 months.

[00:32:55] Joel Neeb: Everyone is going to start recording all of their communications. You’re already seeing people wearing AI lapel pins at tech summits. No inputs, no insights. People are going to realize they need those inputs.

[00:33:16] Scott Kinka: Give me a contrarian opinion.

[00:33:28] Joel Neeb: Everyone says AI is going to “steal” jobs. My view is that everyone’s job will be disrupted. If you’re doing the same thing in two years that you’re doing today, you’ll be obsolete. But here’s the good news: if you can stay just two or three months ahead of the rate of change, you look like a genius. That is your competitive advantage.

[00:34:34] Scott Kinka: What are you reading right now?

[00:34:41] Joel Neeb: A biography of Teddy Roosevelt and The Power of Prediction.

Actually, here is how I “read” now: I upload sections of books to an AI tool and have it read to me while I’m at the gym. I’ll pause it and say, “Wait, I don’t understand that. Explain it to me in simpler terms,” or “How would this apply to 8×8?” It’s like having a conversation with the author.

[00:35:41] Scott Kinka: That is a hot take! I love that. If you had to sum up your business philosophy in one sentence, what would it be?

[00:35:50] Joel Neeb: There’s no better feeling than growing with an elite team and serving an elite mission. Life is not about creating a resume; it’s about who you become along the way.

[00:36:32] Scott Kinka: Last question. It’s a dystopian future, and only one app is still working on your phone. Which one do you choose?

[00:36:56] Joel Neeb: Claude. At this stage, it’s the AI tool. If I have access to all that information, why would I need anything else?

[00:37:14] Scott Kinka: Joel, this has been so much fun. Thank you for your service and for your time.

[00:37:38] Joel Neeb: Me too. I really enjoyed this. Thanks, Scott.

[00:37:40] Scott Kinka: If listeners want to dive deeper into your work, where should they go?

[00:37:48] Joel Neeb: I’m all over LinkedIn. I post all the time and I answer every message. Follow me there and let’s start a dialogue.

[00:37:57] Scott Kinka: Amazing. That’s a wrap on this episode of the Bridgecast. If today’s conversation gave you something to think about, hit subscribe and leave us a review. Check out bridgepointetechnologies.com—don’t forget the ‘e’ on Bridgepointe—or reach out to me at skinka@bpt3.net. Until next time, do what you can to be the signal in the noise.