Frank Murphy: Embracing the Suck – What to Do When Grief Comes for You and Your Team

Are you feeling disruptive? Rebels, we are back in the studio today and I'm very excited and honored to introduce to you all, if you don't know him and you probably do, Frank Murphy. He's— I met him in Boston. He was actually opening up with the keynote, doing some amazing work sharing customer success, all around good human and director of customer success management. Engineering and collaboration, if I recall, at Cisco presently. So, Frank, thank you for coming on the show and chatting with us today. Thank you for having me. I know we go way back, like 6 months, but it feels longer. It feels longer. So, just honored to be here. Thank you. Yeah. Well, thank you again. And I'm curious, like, we always talk about path. I think that we have some really great talent, leadership, people that love customer success, go-to-market, sales, really everything that I feel you've probably touched in your career. Could be wrong. Wrong. Tell us about you and your past. Like, how do you, how do you do all these things and get to a place where you're making wonderful things happen, connecting people at a place like Cisco? Yeah. Um, it hasn't always been like that. My first gig, uh, college was, I grew up in a small town here in Massachusetts in the Boston suburbs. Um, and, uh, college career is in law enforcement, criminal investigations and things like that. This is around, again, I'm gonna date myself, but this is around the time of like Backdraft. Okay. Some of, some of those characters play grandfathers in movies now, just put that in perspective. Anyway, so my town was quite small, one traffic light. And when I came, moved back in, you know, after college and wanted to get into public service, either firefighting or police work, and volunteered in my local fire department training. Got a lot of weird looks from my parents. Like, wait a minute, you just went to school for 4 years and now you're going to run into burning buildings? For free? What? That, that led to a path or led to some redirections out of public service into the private sector, doing investigations. I worked for an insurance company doing things like fraud investigations, arson loss, and things like that. When I showed up for work in my insurance company, there was no mouse on the thing that was in front of me. It was a green screen for computer nerds out there, dumb terminal. Connected to a mainframe in Pittsburgh. Like, what's a mainframe? So I had grown up as the, like, IT nerd, the kid that programmed the VCR, programmed the clock radio, and those sorts of things. So I'd always been exposed to technology as a way of getting stuff done. Like, my favorite toy growing up was, like, the box that the toy came in. Frustrated the hell out of my parents. So that, that kind of curiosity as a kid created a set of skills that I didn't know I would need until I got into the in the workforce, which is that ability to be curious, to look at technology and figure out how does it solve problems, how does it automate what's around me. And fast forward, you know, decade plus later, two decades later, that brought me to a couple different startups. I've been lucky enough to be part of engineering teams where we got in a conference room and a whiteboard and sketched out a product, and it led to handful of patents, uh, and so to, so to go from ideas into tangible things or even software is that, that's been part of the path all along, but doing it as part of a team as well. Wow. Yeah. And I think that's a remarkable story, mostly because I've, I've seen so much from a model perspective and how you approach customer success and leadership, but then to see It's amazing to me the curiosity that you both bring to your team and how you always lead with that. It's like, hey, I want to go solution for this, but it's always really organic. And usually, there's jokes and props. By the way, if you don't know this about his leadership, he can make a prop. He's going to break— I feel like before this call is over, there will be a prop. There'll be a prop. There'll be a prop. There's a prop right here. Back to the Boston— There's a kitty guitar. It's real. I played the guitar for everybody listening. That's how we met. For our 6-month, the 6-month time that I have been learning and growing with Frank as a human and as a friend. It's, it started with that. But yeah, so, and I also love props by the way, and I think it's so important because it gets people excited and doing the fun collaboration stuff. Yeah. I think, totally agree. Yeah. You know, I think a lot about skills and what's coming next, and obviously you do because usually you're inside of this firsthand on the ground, figuring out what's next technologically. And I think about how we're gonna preserve humanity and what that looks like for us and skill sets. That's heavy, right? That's pretty heavy stuff. But as leaders, I feel like we have to check ourselves and get into like that heavy space of how do we do that? So I'm curious, there's lots of skill sets, you know, World Forum report, all these wonderful reports have been put together, excellent global, status of these things, research. But in your opinion, Frank Murphy's opinion, what's the thing if we've gotta prepare our teams with, how do we set them up for success? So when they walk into war, so to speak, they're ready to go, you know, and in a way where they're customer-facing and able to be good at what they do. Yeah, I think it's, there's a term that we use, there's a feature in some of my, some of the technology that we support at Cisco that's called proximity. The technology part of that is like when I walk into a conference room with my laptop, the system knows that, uh, the system knows that there's a device on the wall and it will show up with a button that I touch and I log into my, into my call, whether it's one of ours or even the competitors that we have interop support with. When I started, got into the job about 4 or 5 years ago at Cisco, Everybody knew what that was because that's their job. Collaboration engineers, integrating systems, making the customer successful. What I started to realize was we had this notion of like, show up as your whole self. What does that mean? Prior to Cisco, been through, uh, 2 to 3 different situations where I never had like new hire orientation, especially during COVID That wasn't even a thing, right? Yeah. So the, all I knew were just heads in a box on a screen. And what I realized when I got to Cisco was the idea of showing up as your whole self. It was literally the first time ever that I had told the story of how I lost a daughter. And 6 months later, bomb go off across the street from me. And I think that caught a lot of people by surprise. And what happened was a Several people came to me after the fact, like thanking me for doing that. And I think in, in the kind of digital, all digital world, understanding that there's a person on the other end of that screen, when the green light goes off, or even before the green light comes on, it's important to understand what is that person going through? And when it's on, how do they show up as their kind of authentic self, or if they can't. For whatever reason. You know, my situation's kind of unique in that sense, but to be, to be close to that person, meaning lean in, listen, understand, try to understand what they're going through, uh, and, and support each other in that regard so that when you do have to get on camera and show up with customers, you're able to be your, your best self, or if you're not, that your teammates have your back and can take care of you, sort of shoulder the work. I go back to the firefighting days of understanding that you're part of a team, you're on a truck, you have a role, but you're all part of the same crew. And I think that gets lost in the tech industry where you have certifications and it was a very humbling experience for my team to hear those stories because these are engineers. And they're always the person that people go to for the answer to fix the thing, to understand the— it's our job to write root cause analysis. But when stuff breaks in here, or when the green light goes off, that's incredibly frustrating to admit, first of all, like you're not the smartest person in the room. You don't have all the answers. That is, that is very vulnerable position for folks to be in. So I was I think I was fortunate enough. I know I surprised a lot of people when I laid that stuff out, but years later, people still talk about it. And I think that's a, that's a good thing. I think we need more of that in terms of skills. It's the ability to show up. We're all humans. Stuff's gonna happen in our lives when the green light goes off. Let's talk about it. Green light. So I, I love that. And, um, I've gotta say, if I can, I, I wanna kind of triangulate that to something that is certainly, it's become special to me in the little bit of time I've known you. And I think it would be really helpful for everybody here as we're going into this conversation. You mentioned, and I know you've, you've shared this story in several other presentations that you've shared in the community, which we're very thankful for, by the way, about both your wonderful daughters and their accomplishments. And I'd love it if you take a few minutes and share with us about both of them. About just about who they are as people and their stories and everything. I think that would be wonderful. Sure. Yeah. So, uh, to, and that's actually an interesting point because in prior positions when we doing like icebreaker stuff, it's like, so you have kids? Very common question. But in my situation, and perhaps people who are watching, when you have a child with special needs. Which is Rachel, our, our first was, was diagnosed early with, uh, 5 different congenital heart defects. Luckily, I live in the East. I live in the Boston suburbs. We're surrounded by some of the best, you know, neonatal care in the world. Uh, there's no history of any of that in either of our families. So we were learning about all these huge terms and, uh, cardiologist, cardiac surgeon said, Oh, well, there's a, you know, 1% chance of this happening. There's a 1% chance of something, of some complication after the surgery, which is just, you kind of dismiss those numbers. Um, we were in that 1% multiple times. We knew what she needed. We knew what Rachel needed for cardiac surgery. Usually there's a surgery 2 days old, 2 days old, 6 months old, 18 months old. When you have a person in a white coat explaining that stuff to you at Children's Hospital in Boston, where she got all of her care. They do that like 6, they do surgeries like that like 6, 7, 8 times a day. A day. Like we'd never even heard of this stuff. Wow. So after the first surgery, she was in the hospital for a few weeks. We came home with a, with a, a newborn who needed some medical care. She had a surgical kind of sur— suture, sutures that were healing. When she got to be about 6 months old, her cardiac condition was that it was, she was just kind of weaker. Uh, we have this great picture, uh, heartwarming picture of her as a, as a 6-month-old sitting up in like the, the boppy thing. And I love that because her cardiac status meant that she just wasn't that strong with her upper body. I had, I kind of had to hold her leg in position and then take my hand away when they took the picture. And grabbed her, because of her poor circulation, you could see white fingerprints on her leg because of just her circulation was poor at that point. When she got to be 18 months old, she was in daycare, walking, talking, 2 and 3 word sentences like any other 18 month old. She went into the hospital for the 3rd and theoretically last surgery, and she had a massive stroke and cardiac arrest. As she was recovering from surgery. So, you know, if you take a CPR class, they say, oh, 4 or 5 minutes without oxygen to your brain. She was in arrest for like 45 minutes, so we almost lost her. So as a parent, you go in, you take your kid into the hospital, you expect that you're gonna come out in a better situation than you went in. It's not what happened at all. We were in cardiac ICU for several months. Then down into a step-down floor and then into a transitional hospital in the Boston suburbs. So we came home with a kid that now needed— she was originally, from her arrest, she was completely blind for several days. Over a period of time, she had progressively lost several abilities. If you have anybody that you know that's had a stroke, that's basically what happened after the arrest was she had a a massive stroke. Um, you either lose function and it never comes back, or it comes back, but it's different. In her case, as a kid, when you have strokes and we didn't even like, that's not even, I didn't even know it was a thing for kids. But at that age, the brain is still, is still forming and it basically rewired her abilities. So some of her abilities came back. Others didn't. She was essentially paralyzed on the entire right side of her body, lost the ability to speak, needed the rest of, needed about 70 or 80 hours of nursing care, pretty much around the clock from, from that point on. So every single day was a struggle, full of surprises because of the stroke she had, it did a lot of damage to circuitry in her brain. So she had epilepsy. After that. So like a good, good seizure day was like 100, 120 seizures. Wow. So much so that we had oxygen with us. We were on a first name basis with the paramedics. Yeah. We had nurses in the house and we had a nurse who herself was complaining of symptoms. We got very, we got to be very good at diagnosing symptoms of strokes. I'm sure. And this nurse was talking about pain in her arm and her speech was getting stirred. We're like, okay, 911. Paramedics come in and they come right over across the living room. They come to Rachel. We're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. She's the one, the nurse. She's the one that needs that. Um, so that was like, that was normal. Uh, because she lost the ability to speak, we had to learn sign language. So as Hannah came along 6 years later, perfectly healthy, that kind of environment of nurses and fire trucks and 911 calls and people in and out of the house, that was normal. Wow. That's what she was born— that was her world. That was her world. Yeah. So she got to learn sign language as a, as a toddler. That was her first language. That's amazing. That is so wonderful. Somebody watching, even if you don't haven't gone through my circumstances, highly recommend sign language, bringing that even forward into work on video calls like this. If you want to learn a sign, this is the letter T in American Sign Language. Now, if you're on a video call, instead of saying, I got to do a bio break, I'm going to step away, just do that. Normalize that. Then people know you don't have to interrupt. There's another sign. Uh, that, um, that's incredibly helpful in just different places in society. I think we need more of that because the statistics, the statistics are that eventually, mathematically speaking, everyone will, will develop some form of disability in their lives, whether it's, you know, visual or audio, or if you're watching Netflix or whatever, you turn on closed captioning. Those are features and products that are designed in theory for folks who need an accommodation, but they benefit everybody. So, so seeing that world of, of fragile medical situations and then having another child come into that environment and then 7 years later, Rachel went to school on a regular Wednesday with her nurse, like she had done tons of times before. She came home from work. I was at work. She came, came home from school, laid down for a nap, just like she had done lots of times before. I was 10 minutes away where I worked, at work, sitting at my desk, working on a webinar, I think it was, or a sort of knowledge transfer session the next day. Hannah and my wife were out. Hannah was dancing at the time. I got a call from the nurse that she was not breathing. I'd gotten that call lots of times before, but she was like literally not breathing. And paramedics were already coming to the house. So by the time I got home, it's like a parent's worst nightmare. You come into your home and you see fire trucks and paramedics and people doing CPR on your kid in your house. And she, we lost her. So that like a regular Wednesday, your kid goes to school. You don't see her again. That, and to, to process, for Hannah, to process that as a 6-year-old was, uh, was challenging and beautiful at the same time. She knew that Rachel wasn't going to be sick anymore. That was all she could process. So since then to now, to grow up in that environment, to see what we've gone through as a couple, what our family has gone through. The challenge there is that as just death is so prevalent, but yet not talked about a lot. We're not proximate with each other to talk about those kinds of experience, cuz it's awkward, especially if you're an engineer, especially if you're in technology and you're supposed to be the one with the answers and you don't have those answers. That's really, really, really uncomfortable. So that was normal. That was normal. So I think me coming to, coming into work and normalizing that. Has led to communities, has led to normalizing accessibility because we're all gonna need accommodations at some point in our lives, or your parents are gonna need it, your kids are gonna need it. So why don't we talk about it? No, and while we're, while we're talking, I think, I love that. I think it's beautiful. And I do think that we have to be more open and honest, I think both as leaders and then also as people that are building the technical things that are making the world go to the next level, very apropos innovation for towards the next step of whatever's next, right? It's like, it makes one wonder because I think about someone that's led, you know, all these wonderful startup teams, different capacities, and all of the way that you were living your life. I would say to be a little bit, just to try to put it into some type of framework and words. And one of the things I love, by the way, I'll just give this out to everyone that's listening, is that you talk about 170,000 words in the English language. I love when you talk about that and you're like, there's not really a word. By the way, that's why I'm not asking you the question today of like, how did that feel? What you just described? Because I know there's not really a word. Nope. Am I right about that or wrong? That's right. Yeah. That's the, uh, that's the thing is that if you're married, you lose your spouse, you're a widow, widower. When you lose your parents, you're an orphan. There is literally no word that describes what you are. And for us it was our identity. So to have it just blink of an eye gone. We had retrofitted our house so it was wheelchair accommodation, was ADA compliant. Like we got to be experts in ADA. We got to be experts in loans that we had to take out. We had a wheelchair van. I live in the Boston suburbs. When we were looking at wheelchair vans, uh, we deliberately got the one that has the ramp out the back because I'll say this, these are my people, assholes. They'll park right next to a car with a ramp out the side, cuz they just don't care. Uh, I don't think about that or think, oh, I'm only going running into a store for a couple of minutes. And so like every single day, those kinds of challenges are faced by people who you may never talk to, but are part of society as well. So I think to normalize that and, and be, just be aware, be curious, try to be empathetic is important. For us, that idea that there's no word to describe that. Ways that I've been able to cope is kind of bring, bring this, bring the day job into what happens at night when the lights go off and the sessions end. You know, you think about software, first version MVP, it's buggy, it's not complete. You want to get it in customers' hands. As a former product manager myself, that's a vehicle for feedback. Second version, usually better. Third, fourth, fifth, and so on, you just kind of iterate through features and products get more stable. What I found with Grief is the first year, you can kind of power your way through. You know when birthdays are coming, you know when holidays are coming, you can just kind of grind through that. But it's from, for me and many other people I've met who are dealing with grief years later, it's the second year, it's third year, it's the fourth year where people have moved on and I haven't. Uh, cause you can't. So to, there's some, I can, we can share these after, uh, there's lots of helpful things I've found of art or there's a sculpture in Lake Geneva, a brass sculpture. Created by a grandfather plus a grandchild. Again, there's no, there's not even a word for that. And it's, uh, it's called Melancholy and it's of a brass statue that's just kind of elbows on knees and the entire midsection is completely empty. And you can see, literally see through the statue to the lake in the back. And that's the closest thing I've ever found that, that describes the feeling. Because you are just like, and again, at work dealing with customers, you may be talking to somebody who is feeling that, that way right now, but you don't know. Um, so don't assume that, that they're, you know, listen and ask and be curious about how they're feeling, what they're going through. Because again, mathematically speaking, it's 100% chance that people you love are gonna, gonna leave at some point in their lives. It's gonna be your turn. In the front row at the funeral. So why not talk about it and be open to it and help each other along that journey? Because we're all going to go through it at some point. Yeah. And I can't help, but as you're describing this, it makes me think about a couple of things. It makes me wonder, how do we, I mean, and you talked about sweet Hannah, both your, both your babies, but, um, I love hearing Hannah's story. By the way, Frank isn't telling everybody, so I'm going to. Okay. She got out. I've got to share this, Frank. This child got out. She had a lemonade stand. How many thousands of dollars did this child raise doing this lemonade stand? Instead of this child sitting around, this baby is out. Yep. Being a boss. Amazing baddie. How much? I mean, probably thousands is what you had shared before, right? Exactly. Yeah. So the first, so Rachel passed in October, the next summer, uh, Hannah's buddy Her family was, they had a yard sale. So she was 7 at the time. And she thought it was the coolest thing. Like, you could write signs and stick them on the utility phone poles in the neighborhood. She thought like, that was so cool. She had no idea what a yard sale was. It's just the idea that like, you could write something and stick it on the pole was like the coolest idea. Special Olympics was an integral part of our lives growing up. You know, as a parent of a kid with special needs, your dreams for your kid's future just change. I never, never thought my kid would be on, on the field in Foxborough because she was a kid in a wheelchair. Special Olympics through cheerleading got kids out onto the field. Met the Patriots cheerleaders. Wow. That's cool. And as again, as a As I never would've, never would've imagined that. So Special Olympics was very much part of Hannah's experience growing up as well. So she wanted to do, instead of a yard sale, cuz again, we still had a lot of stuff in our house at that point that still was Rachel's physical, you know, healthcare. She just, just a massive amount of, of equipment. She had a beautiful butterfly on her chair. She did. And, and, uh, so. A yard sale was out of the question, but a lemonade stand could have, could have, could have worked. So, so she had a target of like a couple hundred bucks the first, first time around. Uh, and through Facebook and social media, passed that before even the first, you know, before the first cup was, was poured. And she had several of her close friends in the neighborhood that the Yard Sale Kid, uh, helped out as well. Um, so it was fun. We were teaching, they were learning. Math, so everything in the, every SKU in the price book was like increments of $0.25, all counting in quarters. So most of it was just like paper money and quarters. The second year, more kids, a different charity, more money. Third year, more kids, a diverse product portfolio. So then she's like, wait a minute, people drink lemonade when they're thirsty. So let's do pretzels to make people thirsty. And then we'll do the pretzels and people want to dip them. What goes? Look at that. Chocolate. So the pretzels and the chocolate. And so now there's like this portfolio of things as well. So I think that's helped her understand like your customers, product market fit, pretzel, pretzel market fit. I think maybe that's what it would be. And apparently the equal, the, the, what does that mean sometimes? Chocolate. Exactly. Is chocolate. Yeah. So it was great. It was, it was just, it was great all around. The kids got to have fun. They, they learned math skills by the last year, uh, popped out at like, like 4 or 5 grand. So the money part of it was, was actually not really the goal. It was a side benefit. We don't have any pictures of the final one because you got like 10-year-olds around a kitchen table with piles of cash. It looks like a drug bust. A money laundering thing. No, no, no, no, no. Don't put those pictures online. Don't put that. But they learned about top of funnel. They learned about all this stuff, all these wonderful top of funnel sort of engagement. And then also to your point, like product market fit, how to listen, closing that product to CX, you know, sort of symbiotic kind of relationship early now. I have to ask too, because I think it's so important out of all of this stuff that she learned along the way and learning how to deal with this grief with, of course, your and your lovely wife's support. How long have you been married, by the way? Coming up, we'll be 30 years in June. Yay. Well, happy early 30. That's amazing. That's amazing. Couldn't have done it. Couldn't have done it without her. Well, I tell you, and I will always say good life is in a good partner, isn't it? For sure. Absolutely. Um, you know, and it's, it's just interesting. So now Hannah's like telling stories in real life, like for a profession now, right? She is. Yeah. So she's, it's, you know, growing up she was surrounded by just like managed chaos, unpredictable 911 calls, weeks at a time in the hospital, Rachel spent we stopped counting at 365 overnights in the hospital. Um, and, and when you're a second grader or a third grader, that's just, you can't, you just don't have the, the means to process that. But she knew, she could tell when we were getting snippy with each other. She said, you, you say things that are funny, but it's actually, you don't mean it. Or you say things that are funny, but you're not, but it's not funny. So she understood sarcasm. And, and at a very, very early age, cuz that's what was the environment. So, as she got older, being someone who was kind of in the background behind all of the kind of world that was around Rachel, that was how she grew up. So later on, she got into photography and even in school. So I live in the part of the state where there is a tech, regional tech school. So she got into, right around the time of COVID got into a multimedia program at the local, tech school. And, uh, and I think it gave her a place to express things that she didn't, literally didn't have the words how to express. Um, and she got a gig as the, uh, as the photographer for the sports, for the yearbook. So I'm sitting here in my office one afternoon and she comes by, she's like, I need you to take me to the hockey rink. Okay, she dances, she doesn't play hockey. When? Now. Why? Because I have to shoot pictures for the yearbook. I'm like, so it's like mad scramble, squeal out of the driveway, the rink's like 15 minutes away. Like, you don't know anything about hockey. What is going on here? Bring the hockey to her in a frantic ride, uh, to the rink. Uh, and that was her. She took some amazing pictures that day. And so fast forward to now, she's a second-year student in college. I gotta show the props here. This mug cost me a lot of money, uh, at RIT. So she's a budding photojournalist. So she's using the camera to tell a story in situations like ours and others where you to literally do not have the words to tell the story, but the picture, the movies, that tells the story. So now she's learned to, uh, she's actually taking photos for Special Olympics in upstate New York, and she's captured some amazing pictures that I think, I think only a kid who grew up in that environment understands. We've been stared at. She was stared at going to the supermarket. People come up, people do all kinds of weird, inappropriate, random stuff when you're just trying to get food and get home. But that she was used to that kind of interaction as a kid and knew what kind of sort of knew what we went through as parents dealing with grief. And now she's She's sort of, she's gone from being like behind the wheelchair with Rachel's universe in front to now behind the camera to capture the story. That's, that's in some cases there are no words to describe it, but when you see it in a picture that connects with a sense of belonging, connects with someone's story, it opens a conversation. So now she's shooting again. She's, she's done photography for Special Olympics. She just got her first gig., this, this coming summer doing photojournalism at a dance program called Jacob's Pillow out in central western Mass. It's the longest running international dance festival, dance community. And it's some of her, it combines 3 of her passions around storytelling, photojournalism. And she was at a dance, she was at a dance studio the night Rachel passed. So I think it's where she's, she's kind of found her, or she's going to cringe if she ever hears this, her vibe. I guess that's what the cool kids say these days. I can't keep up. All right. We're going to say vibe for now. We're going to jam. But yeah, so that's, that's, that's a journey that we never thought of. We had these great pictures of her with the little Fisher-Price camera, like literally backwards. That's cool. Um, in the sitting in her high chair and like that kid is now She's doing it. She just recently joined the National Press Photographers Association. She's being taught by folks with multiple professors with multiple Pulitzers themselves. She just went to, uh, her spring break she spent with some of her photojournalism, PJA students they call it, at a seminar learning from other people with Pulitzers as well. So I think she's, we've been very fortunate for all of the things that have happened for her to find. A place where she can express herself, give voice to people who don't have the voice because of what they're going through. And to be able to tell that story is, is we feel really blessed for her to be in that place surrounded. She's got a great community of people around her, wonderful group of dancers that she's part of. She's doing her own choreography now as well. So to come along, we talked about journeys, right? So to come through all that. Kind of twisting path as well is just something that's priceless. Now I'm curious, one of the things I love about how you lead and the little bit of time that I've known you, looking around and getting to know you as a human and hearing how you share, I love how you check and learn. I think it's maybe the engineer in you. It's like the curiosity, follow the product cycle, all these little things. I think it's just the engineer in you maybe, but I'm curious. I'm curious, right? Like, out of all of this, like all of this challenging, beautiful story that there's not really a word to describe, right? What, how do we, how do we take that and translate it to both our teams as leaders, but also our children and families? Like, honestly, Hannah's doing amazing things even in this, this situation of beauty and pain and overcome, like, How does that translate? Like I see, I mean, you're showing up and is the sharing part of that for you? I think it is. Yeah, I think it is. At work, I gotta show one more prop here. You know, we love a good prop on this show. That's the Braille Legos. Um, and when we tried at work, I tried to teach engineers about accommodations and everybody knows, okay, this, click this button over here, you get closed captioning. Change this button and changes the font size. And a bunch of engineers understand the notion of hands-on labs. So what we did a few years back, when the, right after those came to the market, uh, they were designed by Perkins, the School for the Blind here in Massachusetts, which Rachael actually got services from because she was legally blind. I needed to teach the team about accessibility and the legal standards for something that is perceivable, operable, understandable, robust. So I bought everybody on the team a box of bricks. That was our training, came out of our training budget. Yeah. Yeah. And we had a hands-on lab where I gave people 5 minutes, build a thing to do a thing, which is again, as a product person, is what PRDs are all about, right? You get a noun and a verb, support Windows. What does that mean? So everybody had 5 minutes to build a thing to shut off the lights. In their office. Now, some of the people just took the board and they went and hit the light switch. I'm like, no, build it. Build. Build. Then it brought back flashbacks of like, Rachel had to go through IQ tests. And in an IQ test, you have the 3 little wooden pegs that you have to stack up. She never, ever, ever, ever did them right. She would pick them up, she'd chew them, she'd fire them across the room, but she could do it with her foot because that's how she adapted to her world as a kid with hemiparesis. So that was a learning exercise to have fun, play well, like the Lego call to action is, and taught the team that, wait a minute, if I'm trying to make a customer successful, if they can't use the product because they can't touch the screen to mute their camera because their fingers don't work, or like I went through this with my parents. Circulation got poor as they got older, they couldn't use a touchscreen device. It was like my dad was like, he was wearing gloves all the time. To make that, make learning like that, make it accessible. Don't do it in PowerPoint slides, but to do it in something tangible was a way to open up curiosity and open up the conversation. And now we can talk about why if a customer can't use the product because they can't reach the keyboard. That's a commercial risk because when it comes time to renew, they look at the number of users, do the math, do the ROI. If they can't justify it, you're out. It's that simple. So to bring all that together into the workplace to say, these are things that are legal standards, first of all, regulations in Europe, regulations in the US that were set years ago, the ADA, The legal requirements that we used to build the ramp into my house and the doorways, the ramp in the van, I knew those things from my own lived experience, but brought them, was able to bring them into work in a fun way. Now, who doesn't love Legos? And open the eyes of people whose job it is to make customers successful, but then to go through that experience of I can't shut off the lights. I only have 5 minutes to build a thing to do a thing. If the customer can't perform that use case, that's a commercial risk. That's a seat that doesn't get used. So that has led to a lot more curiosity since then. Some of the folks that were part of the lab actually donated their bricks to me. I brought them back to Perkins. So now there's kids at Perkins who are working with other kids, sort of next generation of students who are learning braille. And so to do that kind of full circle has been an honor and a way that, again, no PowerPoint slides could have ever, ever accomplished. So in other words, to make it fun, make it engaging, create a place where it's okay to ask questions and not be judged, especially again with, with engineers or even folks who aren't engineers, but are still responsible for making customers successful. To have that conversation in a fun way, I think is, we need more of that. I love that because I think sometimes in the professional sense, you know, and then in the personal sense, it's really easy. I've found in my experience, it's like we can talk all day as humans about honoring and meeting each other where we're at. Right. And, you know, look at a resource like the Bible, for example, the word honor is in there so many times. So many times. Yep. And I think that there's such a huge difference from arbitrarily saying, hey, look, I respect and honor and meet these people, every people where they are for everything, and having to do that as compliance because you feel like it's compliance and then doing it because it's the right thing. So I'll tell you, I had someone, not a speaker at a professional conference, a preacher actually say to me one time, hey, I had to wear a school uniform one time and it was really uncomfortable. And on a hot day, we would go up into the playhouse on the playground and we would act like we were wrestling each other and we would go swing and we would pull our stuff off and we didn't want to do it. And we wore these uniforms because we had to, right? But we didn't wear them because we wanted to. So when we get to the point where it's like, hey, do we, do we want to honor each other and try to figure out and recognize that there's probably somebody masking grief. Like I noticed in one of the previous presentations, just for the audience here. And we can share some of these resources as Frank is able to do that, of course. And I'm happy to do that too, but it's like, hey, when we mask, it's so easy. I think the show is Dead Like Me, right? Is that correct? Dead to Me. And it's got one of my favorite actresses in it, Christina, who's amazing, Christina Applegate. And I fell in love with her. I cannot remember the movie, but it was the one about Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead. Do you remember that movie? She was so darn dang good in that movie. If you haven't seen that movie, then I need you to go back and there's not a Blockbuster anymore. I can't go tell you to go to Blockbuster and get it, but go get, you need to stream that darn movie somewhere. Make your day better. Okay. But I think about her and that scene that you had shared in one of your presentations, another one of your props, right? And it was her just You know, she's like, yeah, I'm dealing with it. And she's jamming out, like doing hard metal rock, right? Very apropos for Rebel Obsessed thematic here. She's rebelling out, like screaming to herself on the inside, trying to deal with her normal everyday pain and grief. And then the phone rings and she's doing what so many people I would suspect on our teams, in our worlds, our customers that we're interacting with are doing. Hey, I'm doing good today. How are you? And it's like, and I think about you, Frank, when I see that, it makes me think how many times, right? Was that, that you lived that in real time? Yep. Yeah. And that's, uh, that scene, I, we, we could share that clip, uh, yeah. Uh, cuz it's so relatable, so relatable. And she was going through some health. Diagnoses at her own time, I think, as she was filming that. To be able to kind of, again, live the experience and how that affects how you show up. For me, it was my identity. I've, I think, the leader that I work for now, we've gone through 4 companies together because he was my leader around the time I was going through this stuff. So to be able to show up however and whenever you can, and to have each other's back and pick up each other's work is, is, is, is meaningful. So if you're a leader and you have somebody on your team and they're— you, you may be a little suspicious maybe that they're masking and they're trying to hide things. You don't have to pry. That's not what I'm here to tell you to do, but I'm just asking you to be open, be curious, try to be— the idea of being proximate, being close to that person, to lean in, to listen. I know in the tech industry, we love to talk, but listening is a lost art, I think. And trying to understand that when that green light comes on, you're trying in some cases very hard to put your own best, best self forward, but understanding that you have no idea what's going on on the other end of the camera, but at some point somebody's going to be going through something and that could be you. So to be open to that and be as a leader, to look for that in your team, to have a resilient team is— Agreed. No, I can't. I think that that was, and again, that's in my opinion again, and I'm, I'm one opinion, but one thing that I love about everything you just said is, is, hey, these are skills that we have to have. And all the things that you mentioned, even as great as AI enablement and all the wonderful technologies, VR, all the amazing things that I've seen. Seen, right, that you've shared with some of the youth in different events that I've been able to at least witness. Um, it's like all of that doesn't take any of that. It's just about the being human part. And yeah, so this episode wonderfully has already been twice as long as any episode that I've ever launched in almost 4 seasons, and I'm really darn happy about it. The last thing that The last thing I just wanna ask is like, we talk a lot about positive rebellion, if it matters, if it doesn't, like, I'm just curious where, where you sit inside of that. I mean, I know you're honestly the absolute head of a lot of the innovation that's happening right now. I mean, what does that mean for somebody that's living what you're living professionally? Yeah, I think it's, it's two things. One is at work, I've, I've done presale. I've been honored to do presales before and, and got to club. Murphy's Law is the year my team got to club. There was no club cuz it was COVID. Oh, the last thing right here that taunts me every day. But so in the, in the, in the industry, we hustle and grind for certificates to be in clubs or to have that kind of sense of accomplishment. You may find yourself in a club that no one wants to be in. The club of the, of the parents who have a health issue with their child, the club who, uh, in my case, you lose a child and there's no word for that. I went through both of my parents passed within 90 days of each other. They've been together for 58 years. So to, again, you just never know what someone's going through. They could be in a club, in my case, that you never imagined yourself in. And you can't get out of. So to be aware of that, that you never know what's going on on the other end of that. And then the second thing is to be able to, it's okay to be silly. I have, these buckets are filled with props and wigs. That one's got like 6 different wigs in it because we're just, especially at work, there's such a cognitive drain on our ability to focus. And when you're grieving, it's like a piece of software in the background that you can't shut off. It's just chewing up resources. It's chewing up your brain power. So to show up, have fun, be serious, be serious about your work, be a professional, take care of your craft and your brand, but also be aware that it's okay to laugh. Uh, we have a very limited amount of time here. Uh, and, uh, I think it's important to, to, and I think it's possible to do both. It is possible to do both. I think we need more of it, uh, not less of it. It connects us as humans. That's awesome. Now, how does, how do we find more of you? The work that you share? Um, I know you do a ton of work with the youth, different ages. You've shared the Sphero robot and all kinds of cool things with about that I can grab for my kids and So, I mean, how do we, how do we find more and connect with you outside of the conversation here? Yeah. I mean, I'm, I have some stories in the past of career days that we've done. I think the kind of three-line for all of that is, is to be curious, grow together as a team, internationally as well. So that was a great experience to have folks like yourself who are part of the sort of tech community, also part of the customer success community, and then also folks on my team that showed up in a virtual career day from literally the other side of the world. I mean, Europe and Australia that I recall. What am I missing? I know I'm missing somewhere. There's at least two parts of the world. Yeah. Yeah. Two, two folks in, in the school system in Colorado Springs and then two folks in Europe and, uh, and even Nitin, my leader in Australia, showing up with the Apple Vision Pro in person. Admittedly, that was cool. I will say that was a neat sneak peek. I know the kids love that. Yeah. So that, I think we need more of that as well because it's, you just can't, yes, you can be the one with the most certificates and the most, you know, letters after the comma after your name, but inevitably you will need to rely on a community to get stuff done, period. So be open to that as well. So I'm fortunate enough to be part of several different communities, folks who are grieving, Inside of Cisco, we have several different employee resource groups that I'm part of to grow together. Folks with special needs, caregivers for special needs, and neuroinclusion these days, because again, we're all trying to just stay focused and get stuff done at work. So, just on my LinkedIn, I've got some, some stories out there. Lots of different skits that I've done that I embarrass my kid, and that's kind of my job. I take that very seriously. Very seriously, we did a skit last night called Cooking Up Success, uh, which was a ton of fun. A team in Asia Pacific that doesn't get a lot of, a lot of airtime because they're working in the opposite hours. We had, uh, we put together case studies and slides that I don't think get read much. So we did a case study based on a cooking show. That's awesome. Yeah. And, uh, it was a ton of fun. It was ridiculous, but that's kind of the goal. Yeah. I call it random acts of ridiculousness. I think that that connects us as humans. Laughing is, is, I think you can, you can do both. You can be unserious about yourself, humble, understanding that at any point you could be in that club that no one wants to be in. Just realize that. And if someone that you work with is in one of those clubs or they're struggling with something outside of work. Laughter is a great way to, uh, to, to connect as humans. We all need it more so than ever with so many things that are artificial these days. That genuine connection is, is, uh, is priceless. And I think we all need that as a society. Agreed. Well, thank you so very much for sharing your expertise and also your whole beautiful family. Yeah. With us and this story, I think that certainly everybody out there, you know, he said the word community a lot and I love that because one of the things that I appreciate about you, and I'm gonna say this, Frank, and it's the last nice thing I'm gonna say about you today, I promise. He is a very big, even if he's only known you for 6 months, I think if you are at least willing to say, hey, how can I get better? I can say from personal experience that this guy's willing to listen. And is always willing to share in community and give back. And I'm just going to say thank you here for everybody on the phone and listening. I think there's 14— well, actually, I just checked last week, we're up to 16 countries around the world. So, I'm so very blessed that we're able to share this message of hope and just all the things that are so human that make us all honor one another. So, thank you, Frank, for sharing with us today. Thank you. It's, it's been an honor. Uh, I have a whole community behind me. Uh, so this is not just me doing this. I got, uh, blessed to have, uh, the experiences that I've had and be able to meet, uh, wonderful people like yourselves that you didn't, you didn't, you could have said no. I just played the guitar, Frank. I'm gonna say, I said, you know what? I like, he's, he wants to talk about his city. He wants to share about his city. It's the first time I had been to your city. City. And between the library, meeting you, hearing all of the perspectives, and really trying, I got to see a piece of what I believe Boston to be. I will say that I am very glad. It's not the last time I will be back to your city, and I will be forever grateful I got to play that silly plastic guitar. And it will be— I'm sure I will tell you yes again, sir. I'm just being honest. Yeah. And I think, you know, That's, I think that's a great way to leave is to just to be open, uh, to, to grow and, and try new stuff. And it's okay to, to make mistakes. It's okay to be silly. Uh, that's how we learn. Uh, and in my case with grief, that's how I've been able to cope. Um, you don't get over it, you just don't. Um, so being able to connect with people who are, uh, who share passions. It's, uh, as I said, I think we need more of that, not less of that. Maybe that connection and beautiful photographs, like what Hannah is able to bring to the world, maybe that is the answer to some of this. I think so. Connect us as humans. Yep. That's right. Okay, everyone. Well, right. Rebels, we appreciate it. I haven't said this to Frank yet, but this is actually the very first episode of the fourth season of the show. So it's gonna be, uh, released by the time you get this. To the air. This is going to be a limited edition episode, and we hope, we hope that you enjoyed it as much as Frank and I enjoy the little bit of time we've been able to spend together and what I will continue to learn from Frank along the way. So let us know in the resources too. One, one last— this is thank you for helping. Thank you for helping. Thank you for helping. Thank you for helping the community, giving a voice to situations that people might be going through. And happy anniversary. Happy fourth-aversary. Happy fourth-aversary, which is silly. I'm just so glad that we've got amazing people that are listening and sharing and all the things. Now, I'm going to say, Rebels, thank you so much for joining us for yet another episode. And I'm not going to start crying on air today, Frank. And you all let me know. We're going to send some resources out with this episode. But please, please, please let us know. I can funnel questions back and forth and figure out, as well as now you can connect with Frank as well on LinkedIn. But we, we're here to help, as Frank kind of said throughout this whole conversation. Find your community. Okay. There you go. All right. Bye for now, everyone. Thank you for listening. Keep it big and do it different. Hella different.