Heroes in Business - Doug Dennerline Full

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

Doug Dennerline Full by

Up in the sky, look, it's captivating, it's energizing, it's Eliance's Heroes. Eliance's is the destination for entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, inventors, leaders, celebrities, and startups, where our heroes in business align. Now here's your host flying in, David Kogan, founder of Eliance's. It is going to be a jam-packed day today. Wait till you hear who we have coming on first, but let me tell you a quick little secret of who's coming on later. We have the co-founder of Alexa coming on, and also, too, the actor from Happy Days, Patsy Anson Williams. And thank you too for the feedback we continue to have when I head on the former chairman of JetBlue Airways. So make

sure you go to alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-E-S.com. It is the only place where entrepreneurs align. And I'm very excited because we have with us, are you ready? He is the former CEO of WebEx, former president of SuccessFactors, and now CEO and chairman of BetterWorks. With that, welcome to the show, Doug Dennerlein, who could be reached at betterworks.com. All right, Doug, first of all, I got to really just go right into it. You've had and continue to have such a successful career.

Let's talk about it. I mean, can you believe now what's going on? You were the former CEO of WebEx. What's your view now with the whole thing of the virtual and really, I mean, what, 99% of things going now, all web conferencing. You know, it's very interesting to me. I took over running WebEx in 2007. And between that and as an executive at Cisco Systems with telepresence, I was thinking, who would climb on an airplane so inefficient when you can do incredible meetings over WebEx? And, well, it never took off like we wanted it to. It certainly has done very well.

But, wow, Zoom. So, Eric, you won. The founder of Zoom was my employee at WebEx, so a very good friend of mine. And, you know, given a pandemic and now, guess what? People realize how efficient you can be over things like Zoom as a technology. It's fantastic. Yeah. In fact, you mentioned about Cisco.

You ran the U.S. $9.8 billion enterprise system there. I did. I went to Cisco in a really interesting time, David. You know, talk about times in the Valley that really mattered. So I'm an ex-Arizona, born and raised in Arizona, moved to Silicon Valley post-college. And I went to Cisco in 1998, and there were about 14,000 employees. Two and a half years later, we were 48,500 employees. We hired 5,000 people every 90 days for two and a half years.

That's how crazy the company was at that point in time. My sales team went from 400 to 6,000 in that same period of time. How do you manage it? I mean, first of all, it's hard enough knowing 400, let alone all of them. How do you actually manage such a large-scale sales force? Yeah. I had 10 direct reports. They all ran $300 million businesses. And, you know, they were very good at what they did. The culture in Cisco was really a fantastic experience for me. John Chambers, an incredible CEO, had that job for, you know, 20, some 28 plus years or something like that, one of the longest tenured CEOs in history. And he had a culture of building a family. And I felt

like I was in a family at the company. And when you came to the family, you treated the family with respect that it needed. And that held things together really well for us. So let's talk about now you're the CEO, the chairman of BetterWorks. And again, we're talking with Doug Dennerlein, former CEO of Webex, now former president of SuccessFactors, and now CEO and chairman of BetterWorks. You can reach him at betterworks.com. Talk to us, what is BetterWorks? Yeah. So BetterWorks is really an organization that builds software for enterprises that is trying to make it so that, two things, David, we're trying to replace the old antiquated processes of annual performance

reviews. They were created in the 1960s for hierarchical organizations and they don't work. I mean, people hate giving them, people hate getting them. And today's society wants much more interaction than once a year on how am I doing at my job? So we create an application that is a continuous performance management cycle. So there's much more interaction between manager and employee. And we center that whole conversation around a goals application that we call OKRs, Objective and Key Results, which is a platform for using an interaction between manager and

employee about what are your goals this quarter? Why did you pick these goals? Are they aspirational enough? How are you achieving them? Are you not achieving them? Have you hit roadblocks? And so it creates a much better interaction between employee and manager in an organization. So we're going into large enterprises and trying to replace those old antiquated processes

they have in HR with ones that meet the needs of today's workforce, which by the way, is 50 plus percent millennial now and will be 75 percent millennial in a couple of years. What do you think of the world with just everything on technology in itself? I mean, now, you know, being a CEO and chairman of BetterWorks and just in general and the whole growth. And then the second part of that is, is where do you see things going? I mean, you have so much wealth of experience. do you see things going? I mean, you have so much wealth of experience. You really, our listeners and myself, we need to know. Yeah, it's, you know, I do believe that this pandemic has changed the work environment forever. And people might think, oh, you know, we have short memories as people,

and over time, we'll forget it and go back to the things we did before. But I do realize, I do think that people around the world have realized how much more efficient they can be and how much more work they can get done when they don't do things like climb on airplanes and waste hours and hours sitting on an airplane seat. I think there'll be an ever-changing environment in the buildings that people work in. I think there'll be a lot more work from home. I think people have realized it's no longer about needing somebody to be in your neighborhood, to be in your company. It's where's the best talent in the world, candidly, to do that job and go hire that person. And then we're learning ways to manage them with our software, with Zoom, with Slack. The productivity tools that are available

today are outrageously good. Yeah, incredible. And what we're doing too at the Alliance's Hero Show, because you're listening and watching me, David Kogan, host of the Alliance's Hero Show, make sure you go to alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-E-S.com. We're doing video. We're doing radio. We're on every single practically podcast and site that exists. And we've got the opportunity today because we've got Doug Dennerlein, former CEO of WebEx, former president of Success Factors

and CEO now and chairman of BetterWorks. So make sure you go to betterworks.com. And of course, we'll have it again on our website at alliances.com. All right. So Doug, you've also got a goals summit coming up. Talk to us about that because there's some pretty influential people besides yourself that are going to be there. iconic investor at Kleiner Perkins and also the lead investor in Better Works will be there. He's the first money in Amazon, the first money in Google, the first money in Intuit. The guy's

amazing, a wonderful human being. And I've also invited John Chambers, the CEO and Chairman Emeritus of Cisco, as we talked about, will be an opening panel. And then to end the day, opening panel. And then to end the day, Jimmy Blackmon, the author of Pale Horse, he's an incredible human being, went out for us and oversees multiple times, wrote a book, an incredible leader, is going to talk about leadership. And then we have a bunch of breakouts in the afternoon, David, where we've invited leaders from companies like Udemy and the next generation education space, Informatica, Intuit, and others to do little breakouts to meet those executives and see how they're running their companies using all these amazing technologies today. That's fantastic. And how could they find out more

about registering for Goals Summit? Just go today to betterworks.com and you can register through the website. All right. We've got a couple minutes left. I think it's important to note with the wealth of experience you have and the number of new employees that you brought on at various companies, we want to know what the secrets are that you could share, having now doing again all over again, for new employees that are coming in to companies, what can they do to engage, to bring them up, to increase their skill set? Because there's ones that rise to the top like yourself. And I'm sure that as you hire, you begin to see it very quickly.

But what things should they know and should they do? Without a doubt, it's those people. I have the saying, when I spend a half an hour with somebody, did I get energy from them? Did they take energy from me? I want to be around people that give me energy. I want you to be brave. I want you to stretch yourself. I want you to ask for forgiveness. I want you to challenge the status quo. I want you to have a voice. I want you to have an opinion. I say to people, if I just spent an hour with you in a meeting and you didn't say anything, you didn't need to be there, right?

So I'm looking for people that are those diamonds in the rough that know that they have something to offer and they're willing to be smart about when they speak up. And tell us what you know and tell us what you think. And don't be shy. Excellent. Well, remember, diamonds in the rough, so there's still a chance for me. Well, Doug, you lead with your heart and you inspire organizations and you've led to operate it at their highest level. That's a hero. Doug Dennerlein, make sure you go to betterworks.com, E-E-T-T-E-R-W-O-R-K-S.com. This has been David Kogan with Alliances.

And continue to stand by when we get the co-founder of Alexa on next.