Six Degrees of Joe Tucci

As of right now I’m six management hops away from Joe Tucci.  There are five levels of management in between myself and the leader of EMC.

Let’s say that the distance from the top can be described as “n”.

So what do we traditionally call a person in a large organization with a separation degree of (n <= 3)?

Well, we’d usually call them a leader.

What do we traditionally call a worker where (n > 3)?

Maybe we’d call them an individual contributor or a manager.

Specifically, though, how about (n == 6)?

PEON?

New Math

I’m finding that the traditional algorithms to determine leadership don’t necessarily apply at EMC anymore.  At EMC it’s called “Leaders Everywhere”.  The mathematical way to describe this would be to say that leaders exist at level (n == m) where “m” is any whole number greater than or equal to zero. There is now an expectation of leadership at every level.

Maybe expectation is too strong of a word. I could use the word opportunity instead. It actually depends on your n-level.  Those with a low n-level (executives) are expecting employees to step up and display leadership. Those with a high n-level (software developer, in my case) have an opportunity to assume leadership.

Why is this?

Social Media and EMC

The walls have come down when it comes to the separation of the masses who produce products and services and the masses who consume them.  EMC has always gone to great lengths to bring those two sets of people together.  But this effort doesn’t always scale.  EMC is larger, has more products and services, and more customers, than ever before.  The equation of who gets to meet with who doesn’t always solve.

Fortunately there are some (n <=3) types (and their n > 3 workers!) who saw this coming a long time ago.  The solution to the problem came about like this:

• It’s getting harder and harder to fully engage the ever-growing customer base
• There’s a resource pool of over 30,000 bright information experts at EMC
• Social media techniques are scalable

Execute Internally

The solution is to take advantage of EMC’s global talent pool and use social media techniques to scale our effectiveness in the marketplace. Before EMC could execute this strategy externally, it needed to execute internally.  The masses at EMC needed to become proficient at social media.  Enter Chuck Hollis and team.  I wrote about Chuck’s agenda in a previous post.  His team has implemented an in-house platform for the masses to hone their social media skills.

There’s been varying degrees of participation on the internal site.  My impression is that the people who participate actively all have one thing in common.

They’re the first wave of new leaders.

I think an example would make my point.  While the social media newbies were busy learning their way around the internal site, it became apparent that there was already a large number of external (non-EMC) bloggers that were too many to number. What were they saying?  Who was worth listening to? Where to start?

Along came Gina and team in Education Services. They saw the need for “This Week in Blogging”, a condensed summary of important storage blogs in the industry. They’ve used the internal platform to educate all of us on what’s going on in the storage blogosphere.  Nobody told them to do it.  They know what they’re good at (education), they saw a need, and they took the initiative.

Everybody Leads.

Execute Externally

There’s a new wave of EMC external bloggers who just joined the brave souls who have already been out there for months.  I’m one of the new guys. Now, it takes a lot of effort to pull oneself away from your day job and write something for external viewing.  Why did I become involved?

Well, I started reading some of the industry blogs. Is RAID dead?  What is XAM and why use it?  These were questions that customers were reading. And I wasn’t seeing many answers that I agreed with. Putting a “team” together to immediately get some answers out to customers is not scalable.  But the answers to these questions and more are all over this company.  What to do?

Take the lead.

My articles on RAID are a good example. I don’t need to tell customers that CLARiiON is a trusted repository, they’ve been buying it for years and continue to do so. But every year new options appear. Should I use a different form of RAID?  What’s the place of RAID in cloud computing?  Some of the answers can be found in the origins of CLARiiON. Take a look at how it was built. Take a look at how it continues to be tested. And demand nothing less.

Opportunities and Expectations

I’m clearly not the only EMC employee that got the message. With dozens of bloggers and thousands of readers, the internal platform is hoppin’.

The other day I got an email from a CLARiiON user that was struggling with questions about how best to deploy deduplication on a CLARiiON.  He wondered if I could blog about it.  I would have loved to, but I’m far from being a dedup expert. But I still was able to help.

I just told him to go read Scott Waterhouse. Man that guy can write a good blog and explain dedup clearly. How’d he get so good at blogging?

Steve (n == 6) Todd