 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto Studios for a CUBE Conversation. We're talking about the Citrix Workspace Summit. It happened earlier today and we've got one of the experts in the field, theCUBE alumni, and always a really fun guest to have on. Left to welcome Tamara McLeary. She's coming to us from Colorado. She's the CEO of Thuleum, but you know her from social media and senior at all the conferences and speaking at Tamara. It's great to see you again. Jeff, it's so good to be here. Hey, next best thing to being in person. Absolutely. I mean, there is some good stuff. Neither of us had to get on an airplane today and we were able just to connect via the magic of the internet, which I think people forget how magic it truly is. So I looked up, we last spoke, it was mid-April. We were about a month into this thing after the kind of shutdown. And really the topic there was about this light switch moment on the work from home front. Now we're seven months into this, eight months into this. And clearly it's not going away anytime soon. And even when it does, it's not going to go back exactly to the way it was. So first off, how are you doing? Because I know you spent a lot of time at conferences and traveling all over the world. So your life's been changed quite a bit. And then two, just your kind of perspective as we've moved from the light switch moment to that this is the new normal and will be the new normal going forward. Maybe not exactly how it is today, but we're not going back to the way that it was before. You couldn't be more spot on, Jeff. In fact, when you said April, to me it almost feels like not seven months, it feels much longer ago. And since the last time I got on an airplane was the end of February. And that was a huge disruption to me in my life. I'd always been in three, four cities a week, every week and haven't traveled on an airplane since February. So the world is different and it is shifted and there's no going back. We can't step in the river twice and hit that same spot. I totally messed up that quote, but that's me. You're used to that already. Exactly. But some things don't change. But I think when we look at work and what we were talking about back in April is that now we're looking at the potential for kind of a hybrid approach, whether we're talking about work or even kids, some kids going back to school, there's a hybrid approach. And with that comes its own set of complexities that we have to consider. So not only has the culture shifted into a place where you have your workforce who has gotten used to working remotely. And there's a lot of things with working remotely that we didn't have when office was the central focus for the workplace. So there's a lot of flexibility when you work from home. And I think one of the interesting things with the Citrix Summit was when CEO, David Henshel talked about how it's the people, right? So it's our workforce, our employees who are most valuable but also our most costly assets. So we have to make sure that the employee experience is one that is pleasing and helps us to have not only talent acquisition, but also talent retention in a really dynamic competitive atmosphere. And I'm sure I just like posed this question so we could go a million different places with this. What do you want to go with it, Jeff? Well, I was just going to say, and of course we can go forever and we don't have forever. So at some point we'll have to stop talking at the end of this interview. But I just love having you on. And what I want to drill in is we've talked about the new way to work for a very, very long time. This is not a new topic and we've had remote work tools and we've had VPNs and we've had mobile phones now since 2007. But while he didn't have this forcing function and I think that's what's really different here is that now it wasn't a choice anymore. There was no more planning and talking about it and maybe or maybe not work from home was kind of a first-class citizen in terms of priority. COVID changed all that dramatically overnight and it's driven home this other kind of concept which we talk a lot about generically in terms of the customer experience as they interact with our applications which is the way that now they actually interact with the company. And we've talked a little bit about new way to work but now it's really driven to the forefront because as she said, there's a lot of benefits from working from home. You get to eat dinner with your family. You maybe can pick up a few more of the kids' activities whether it's a sports game in the middle of the afternoon or something in the evening. But there's also a lot of stress. There's a lot of kind of this always-on and this constant notifications whether it's coming from email or text or Slack or Teams or Asana or whatever. So, refocusing on the employee experience and elevating that up into a much more important thing as you said for both wellness and employee satisfaction but also retention and getting new employees has really changed the priority of that whole set of kind of point of view around the employee experience that wasn't there kind of pre-COVID. Absolutely. And I think you just tapped onto something that I think affects all of us who are juggling these multifaceted lives and that is the constant interruption and distraction and that costs money. And I think about that as the CEO of our organization is that how many of these distractions could be avoided to create efficiency and productivity. It also creates happiness for the individual. I don't think anybody likes to be constantly distracted but when you have a bunch of different applications and you don't have them in one accessible place and you're constantly having to flip between these applications you can cause a lot of friction and frustration. And I think genuinely that was my very first introduction to Citrix was the ability to really streamline and have everything in one place on a beautiful dashboard that was personalized to the individual. Not everybody in the organization needs to have all the applications. Some of your employees only need a few and it just depends on who they are and what they're doing within the organization. And so I think decreasing that friction making it easier for people and certainly ensuring not only a frictionless experience at home but also ensuring security is huge. I mean, how many times have we talked about cyber security is not on a bolt on afterwards. It has to be all the way up through the stack. And certainly we did have an increased threat landscape with work from home situations because there were all these security breaches and issues and vulnerabilities. So I know we're not talking security today but I'm wild about it but I think that all of these things what I like about what Citrix is doing and I enjoyed the summit is the fact that they're blending everything into a single solution so that it just gets done. Work gets done from wherever you are whether you're at home, you're in office or in your car, work gets done. And not only work, but I thought the theme that's interesting to get came out in David's keynote is our best work. It's like good work and high value work. And there's really kind of two aspects of that. One, as you just said is please help me with the distractions and use machine learning and artificial intelligence and this unified platform to decide whether I should or should not be distracted. Also help me prioritize what I should be working on kind of right now, which again, a great opportunity for AI and ML to elevate that which is most important to the top of my inbox. But even more, one of the keynotes was integrating the concept of wellness and not just wellness like in the HR manual at the back after vision and dental and getting your health checks, but wellness even where the application suggests that you take a two hour window in this particular period of time to be thoughtful and do some deep thinking. And so much of the people we talk about like in automation and getting rid of drudgery and errors and all the bad stuff that comes from doing crappy work. Not only is it not fun, but it's super error prone. This is a really different way to use technology to help the employee, as you said, not only just get work done, but get good work done, get high value work done, prioritize good stuff and not just deal with the incessant handpicking that is the notification world that it's really easy to fall into if you don't turn some of that stuff off or at least tone them down a little bit. That's so true. I don't know if you saw this, but there was a study by Stanford of, I think it was 16,000 workers and over a nine month period they did the study and it was a study looking at work from home and whether productivity was increased and because at first you remember what it was, Jeff. I mean, in the old regime, we would thought, oh dear, we don't want a remote workforce because everybody's gonna be hanging out in their pajamas and screwing around and not doing work and that's not true. What ends up happening is that the study showed that productivity increased by 13% and I mean, that's huge, right? So there was a huge bump in performance and in this particular study, the variables that they cited was perhaps that they had a quieter workspace. I mean, you're not getting barraged by all of the endless meetings unless you have endless new meetings but that's a whole nother conversation. But you're having more time to focus and flexibility on when you work which also increases focus but I thought what you mentioned, the wellness piece was important because then, if you look at other studies, like there was a Forbes article that cited that the average worker starts at 8.32 AM or something like that and works until 5.38 PM and I think the days of the week that were the most productive were Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays but this was interesting. I thought telephone calls were up by 230% so the calls that employees were making and CRM activity was up by 176% and email up by 57% and chats up by 9%. So what we're seeing is that, people are trying to find creative ways to remain connected and communicate but in different ways and I think that's where the wellness piece comes in and kind of what you were saying with that, I think it's a micro app that Citrix has on their workspace their workspace dashboard that pops up a reminder and says, hey, you think you should take a break or get up from your desk but I think that what's nice about that is it's easy to get sucked into your computer all day. I'm guilty, I will definitely say I can start off pretty darn early in the morning usually around five and go till late at night but it's all in front of the computer screen so maybe I need that Citrix workspace solution to tap me on the shoulder and tell me to go take a meditation break. At least one of those watches that'll tell you to get up and twist around. Well, let's shift gears a little bit. They had Satya Nadella on and Satya is a phenomenal executive been super successful turning that big, very large boat Microsoft into really a cloud company and a SaaS company and nothing but great success always happy to hear him. He had some interesting comments I want to run by one of them he said, we were dogmatic about work before but don't replace what we were with just a new dogma and what he really highlighted a obviously without the technology platform and cloud and all these tools that we have in place this couldn't have happened but more importantly, he said it really highlights the need for flexibility and resiliency and to really again kind of elevate those to first class citizens as to what you should be optimizing for and really the highlight within this suddenly shift with COVID that if you've got those capabilities you're going to be successful and if you don't, you're in real trouble. You know, I'm glad you brought Satya up because he also said something really cool that I think is true and that is we are running right now currently we are running a global scale experiment to remember him saying that and I thought it's so true. I think right now the social scientists are going wild because finally they've got their captive collection of their study, their getting things but you know, the other thing he was saying too is that we're going to be harnessing all these technologies to be able to re-skill and upskill and you know, how long have we been talking about this Jeff with the future of work but it will be a re-skilling and upskilling of the workforce. He even mentioned holographic technology. He didn't go into it but just the mention of it got me thinking about how we are currently using some of those nascent technologies to be able to you know, upskill and re-skill our workforces and also protect the workforce that doesn't necessarily need to be on scene on the edge of it all. And then he gave an example of like an engineer being able to communicate with a first line worker without having to be actually in the physical presence. And so you know, I think this crucible that we're in called a global pandemic forcing us, forcing our hand really to do all the things that we've been talking about at all these conferences that we've been to for me maybe the past two decades is that it's show, don't tell. So we're not talking about anymore. We actually have to do it. And you know, and another thing that Satya said was that, you know, nine to five is definitely not true anymore with work, it's flexibility. And it's really, he also mentioned this EEG study into meeting fatigue. Yes. I thought it was pretty wild, an EEG study into meeting fatigue. And I bet even without reading that study all of us who are on video conferencing systems I can probably tell what the outcome of that was. But concentration wanes very quickly. In fact, I think in that study it was after 20 minutes. But so kudos to Citrix for putting on their summits because did you notice for once we had the enjoyment of all these just really contents deliciously packed segments that were short? Right. Whereas at live events, they went on way too long. I mean, you know, even customer stories went on way too long. And I really love the staccato nature of these customer stories and, you know, partnerships and what was working. And, you know, I just thought that they did a really nice job. And it was interesting because it met perfectly with staying underneath that 20 minute window before attention wanes. Right, right. And they even broke it up into three conferences, right? It was Citrix Energy before, now it's WorkSpaces, it's cloud and then the third one will be security. But I want to double down on another concept. We talked about it last time with you and with Amy about measuring work and about kind of old work paradigms in terms of measuring performance that were really based more on activity than output. And this concept that work is an output, not a place. And it kind of makes you think of talking about cloud in a cloud-centric way of thinking about things. It's not necessarily the delivery method. It's about adopting quick change and rapid pace and having everything available that you need anywhere you are at the same time. So, you know, it seems strange to me that it took this to drive people to figure out that they should be measuring output and not activity. And there was some early applications that came out when this all went down, you know, that are going to report back as to how often are you looking at your Zoom calls and how often are you sitting in front of your desk and all this silly stuff that just, again, misses the point. And I think this whole cut employee experience is, as you said, make them happy, make them feel fulfilled. They want to do meaningful work. They want to do high-value work. They just don't want to be an integration machine between the email system and the accounts receivable system and the accounts payable system. You know, there's so much of an opportunity to get more value from the people which, oh, by the way, makes for happier people. So, you know, you think finally we're at a point where we can start getting away from just measuring activity unless that's your job to put a widget on a screw and really focus on output and high-value output and innovative output and deep-thinking output versus just, you know, checking another box and passing the paper down the line. You know, Jeff, that reminds me of what Erica Volini, I think she's what global human capital practice is that Deloitte, I really loved her presentation. I also like the fact that I felt like she was speaking from her home and she mentioned she's a new mom and so there was this warmth and connection there, which also I think is something really that we don't think about being, but it is a gift since we've all had to work from home is being able to see kind of executive individuals in a regular environment and it humanizes it all, right? She said something really interesting in her talk. She was talking about re-architecting the future of work and she was talking about essentially the premise was that, you know, human beings need, crave, have to have work that's meaningful and real and part of this whole experience piece, part of this removing the friction from the experience of the employee and providing opportunities, stimulating growth opportunities for employees to give them that sense of meaning, but also she talked about the relationships. I mean, work is a huge part of the relationships in our life and so, you know, this meaningful relationships and connections and in her architecting the work of the future, it's harnessing technology in service to humans to do a better job. And I think the word she used was augmentation, right? So the augmentation piece would be, you know, as we think about reinventing or, you know, reimagining or re-architecting, we look at what's going to happen when we have the human working with the machine but the machine in service to augmenting that human being to do potential is what she was talking about, to really reach their potential. And so it's not about being replaced by technology, it's not being replaced by artificial intelligence with machine learning algorithms, it's actually working in tandem so that technology potentiates the human that is using the technology. And I think that was a really good way of putting it. Right, right. I mean, we talk, it's one of our taglines, right? To separate the signal from the noise and the problem is with so many systems now and I forget, you may know at the top of your head the average number of applications that people have to interact with every day to get their job done. Too many. Too many. Too many. It's a lot. So there is a lot of noise but there's also some signal. And so if you're not paying attention you can miss the signal that might be super, super important because you're overwhelmed by the noise. And so I think it is a real interesting challenge. It's a technology challenge to apply the machine learning and artificial intelligence to sort through the total flow to be able to prioritize and separate the signal from the noise to make sure we're working on the stuff that we should be working on. And I think it's a growing challenge as we just seem to always be adding new applications and adding new notifications and adding new systems that we have to interact with versus taking them away. So the Citrix has an approach where we're just going to bring it all in together under one place. And so whether it's your Salesforce notification or your Slack notification or your Zoom meeting, whatever. To have it orchestrated as a single place so I don't have 18 tabs, 14 browsers and two laptops running just to get my day job done. You're going to make me self-conscious of all the tabs I have right now. Thanks a lot, Jeff. You know, I like hearing stories, right? I think stories communicate to me kind of these practical applications. And I think the Citrix did a brilliant job in their workspace summit of highlighting some of these customer stories that were really inspiring during the pandemic. Like one of them was a city national bank and Arielle Carrion. This is a test of my memory. He's the CTO, right? A city national bank. And he's talking about that. You know, they'd already had a partial migration to the cloud prior to the pandemic. So obviously there was an advantage for those organizations that already had their toe in the water. So, but when the pandemic hit then it really catalyzed that movement all the way into the cloud and essentially creating a digital bank. And what was really interesting to me is that they funded like 9,600 loans and taking on new clients during that time of transformation to a digital bank. And one of the coolest things that he said to me was that, you know, in a regular program it would have taken, mind you, get this, it would have taken 14 years, 14 years. That's a long time. To accomplish what they did in three months. I was blown away. Right? Just to me that speaks a lot because what we're talking about here is their clients are small business and who do you think was impacted most during the pandemic, small business? So the ability to get loans was critically important to the survival of a lot of, you know, companies. And, you know, the same story they had with, you know, like eBay and David Lesour was talking, he's a senior manager office, she's a senior manager in the office of the CIO, I think I remember. And he was talking about how, you know, obviously eBay, it's digital platform, right? But if you think about the pandemic when we were all have these, you know, shelter in place orders, lots of people were able to still make money and earn a living because they were able to do business, you know, on eBay. And both eBay and that city national bank are obviously customers of Citrix. But I just found this to be really inspiring because for eBay pre-pandemic, it was like, I don't know, I think they said they had like 11,000 connected users prior to the pandemic. And a lot of those were in physical call centers. Right. And then post-pandemic, I think he was reaching the saying end of Q4 was going to be something like 14,000 connected users. That's huge from 11 to 14. And again, to your point, it's kind of forcing our hand into really, not only pivoting, but increasing our speed in this ever-changing dynamic environment. Right. You know, one of the other things that came up before I let you go that, you know, it's always nice to have frameworks. Sometimes it just helps us organize our thoughts and it's kind of a mental cheat sheet. And they talked about the four C's. Connectivity, content, collaboration and culture. And I would have to say they're in inverse order of how I would potentially have prioritized them. But I just want to zero in on the culture piece because I don't think people focus enough on culture. And one of the things I think we talked about in April, I've certainly talked about a number of times going through this thing in leadership in these crazy times is that the frequency and the type and the topics in communication within your internal world have gone up dramatically. I think we had a CMO on the other day and she said, you know, internal comms is a big company prior to COVID was important, but not that important within the list of the CMO's activity. But then once this thing hit, right, suddenly internal communications, again, in terms of frequency and the types of topics you're talking about and the forums that you talk about and the actual vehicles in which you talk about, whether it's a all hand zoom call or it's more frequent one-on-ones with your manager, you know, really, really increase the importance of culture. And then I think probably is going to show over time that people that have it right, you know, getting some separation distance from the people that got it wrong. I wonder if you could just talk about it because you're a big culture, you're a big culture person and you know how important, you know, the people part of the whole thing is. Yeah, culture drives everything, you're right. And that was Citrix's CIO who gave those four C's, I think, Mira Rajavev. Yep, yep. She gave those four C's and you couldn't be, you couldn't have tapped into something that I think is the soft underbelly of the organization, which is what is the culture? And anyone who's worked in an organization with a sick culture knows that it's just, it's cancerous, right? It grows and it causes decay and I don't care how much innovation you have if the culture is sick, you just, you're gonna lose your best people. It's hard to work in a sick culture. And so I think, you know, what we had to do is when we all started working remotely, that was a culture shift because, you know, we were siloed off of it. We weren't actually hanging out in physical space. You know, some of the things that we enjoyed about, you know, meeting with other human beings physically changed. And so it really behooved organizations to take a look at how they were gonna foster culture digitally, how they were gonna create that sense of bonding between not only those within your departmental area, but, you know, crossover into other areas. And I think that creating that culture that says I don't have to be in the exact same physical space but we can still connect. I mean, you and I are doing this, you know, we're not in the same physical space, but I'm still gonna feel like we met today. Right. You can create that for your employees. And it also means that we learned that we don't have to be in that same physical space, and I thought that was a really interesting position when Hayden Brown, the CEO of Upwork, was talking at the summit and saying that, you know, even when we look at creating culture with employees who aren't necessarily, you know, maybe it's a workforce from all over the world that you're using, a remote workforce. And when you're using things like, you know, employees, you know, if you've got work to do and you can find a really good talent and you can grab them for what it is that you need, you're actually increasing your ability to be able to deliver on things versus having to worry about whether you have that person in-house. But you still can create that culture where everyone is inclusive, where someone can be, you know, in Australia and someone's in San Francisco and someone's in the UK and you still have to create a cohesive, inclusive culture. And it matters not anymore whether or not you are a full-time employee or if you're a contract worker, I think in today's space, and certainly in those future of work conversations, it's more about, to the very first thing you said at the beginning, it's more about output. How's that for tying it back up? Yeah, very good. And that was totally unplanned, but it's about output. And that's going to be the future of work culture. It's not going to be the title that you have whether or not you're a full-time employee or a part-time employee or a contract worker. It's going to be who are you meeting with? Who are you having these digital interfaces with and slacking with or, you know, using any sort of platform application that you want to use. It's remaining in touch and in communication and no longer is it about a physical space. It's a digital space. Right, right. All right, well, I'm going to give you the last word. You are a super positive person and there's reasons. And for people that haven't watched your TED Talk, they should, I think it's super impactful and it really changed the way I look at you. So of all the negatives, wrap us up with some positives that you see as we come out of COVID that going through this experience will make in our lives, both our work lives as well as our personal lives. Well, since you're going to allow me to go deep here, I would say one of the things that COVID has brought us is pause. It caused us to go in. And, you know, with any dark night of the soul, we have to wrestle with the things that are real for us and the things that fall away are those that were false. False perceptions, false ideas, illusions of even thinking who we are, what we're doing. And we had to come home to ourselves. And I think one of the things that COVID gave us through uncertainty was finding a center in that uncertainty. And maybe we got to know our beloveds a bit more. Maybe we got to know our kids a bit more even if they drive us crazy sometimes. But in the end, I think maybe we all got to know ourselves a little bit more. And for that, I think we can harness those seeds of wisdom and make better choices in the future to co-create together a future that we are all pleased to wake up in, one that is fair, one that is equal, one that is inclusive, and one that we can be proud to have contributed to. And that's what I hope we've taken from this extremely hard time. Well, Tamara, thanks for sharing your wisdom with us. Really appreciate it and great to see you. Good to see you too. Thank you. All right, cheers, Tamara. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.