Rami’s Story and His Path to Juniper’s Corner Office

0:00 welcome to fort knox i am john fort here this time with Rami Rahim the ceo of juniper networks rami welcome and i'm

0:08 going to start the way i always do asking about today's toughest problem and given the economy

0:14 uh given the stock market given supply chains uh take your pick but what would you say

0:21 the toughest problem either in a literal sense or from a leadership and management perspective is

0:27 yeah first john i want to just thank you for having me i'm uh delighted to be here i think if you were asked many

0:33 people in my shoes today they'd probably start by saying supply chain supply chain is sort of the

0:39 a pretty tough challenge these days that anybody that's in the business of developing systems that have a hardware

0:45 element you're going to deal with the challenges of procuring components shipping products all over the world and

0:50 we're not immune to that i have to say i am proud of the way that my team has been handling the situation

0:56 but you know my view is that's a problem that's going to be transitory eventually that will resolve itself

1:02 uh a tougher more strategic problem is you know juniper is in an industry that

1:08 is changing uh where the past has been about developing solutions that help companies

1:15 scale the internet but speeds and feeds about performance i think the future is

1:20 not about that the future basically treats that as stable stakes it's about experience basically every project

1:28 every uh digital transformation initiative in a company in a corporation

1:34 depends on the network and performance of network is no longer enough it really is around the experience that that

1:40 network delivers to the end user that becomes the most important thing that's a challenge because it presents new

1:46 problems to solve but it's also a wonderful opportunity for juniper to embrace

1:51 what and maybe this is too uh cute or abstract a question but we what even is

1:57 the network anymore i used to think of the network as something that you could go

2:02 look at right like you could go into the closet and look at the networking gear routers and switches depending on which

2:10 point you want to look at and then eventually you know you're going into the enterprise and you're looking at either the cabling or you know the the

2:17 wi-fi routers and whatnot but now in this 5g internet of things era

2:23 everything is becoming networked right and then you've got software-defined networking so is the

2:30 value in the software or you know how much of it is in the hardware how much of it is custom chips i mean

2:36 it gets what is a networking company anymore you know you don't know how good a

2:43 question that actually is because when i started a juniper 25 years ago

2:49 the network was built of networking elements that were essentially pieces of hardware that contained the silicon the

2:56 transistors all the way all the entire software stack and that was value that

3:01 was sold to our customers on a crate that's not the network anymore yes of

3:06 course there is still a hardware element to the network because at the end of the day you need these big high performance

3:13 devices that move information move packets from point a to point b but

3:19 many elements of the next generation network the network for the next decade are in software layers that have now

3:26 been extracted from that system that sits on the crate that ends up in a central office or a data center and has

3:33 moved in the cloud so one of some of our most differentiated products take our

3:38 client to cloud ai driven enterprise solutions the control and the management of that

3:44 network is no longer something that our customers need to deal with as on-prem technology it's delivered as a

3:52 service from the cloud what's the net effect of that dramatic simplicity in how you operate a

3:59 network in many ways we're moving towards a network that operates itself because the intelligence of that network

4:05 no longer resides in the network but it actually sits in the cloud that overlooks things manages things operates

4:11 things optimizes things that's the future that we're driving towards so where's the value in the ecosystem then

4:18 i came up in tech as a reporter during i think more of the hardware scale era

4:23 where you had yes you had like individual networking players like you guys like cisco but then you had hp and

4:31 dell right trying to build up as much share of wallet in the enterprise as

4:36 possible and fold in things like at least your lower level networking and

4:41 then you know deliver a services organization that was just able to suck all of that revenue up and and

4:48 simplicity meant having a lot of people and being able to sell everything through those people now you've got

4:55 these hyperscaler cloud players that are also about scale and also i think to some

5:02 degree about um commoditizing specialized players potentially like

5:10 juniper so how do you thrive in that era either become a consolidator or become so differentiated

5:17 that that doesn't happen yeah so it's another good question you thrive by innovating and this is a

5:24 competitive industry in some cases you're competing not just with your

5:30 peers and your classical competitors you're competing with your customers and you brought up

5:35 for example the hyperscale cloud providers practically every hyperscale cloud provider is a juniper customer

5:42 today and yet these are companies that are packed full of very smart engineers

5:47 that can do a lot on their own so in some sense you're always competing with

5:52 them you're demonstrating to them that you can keep up with their your their requirements you're demonstrating to

5:58 them that you can innovate in ways that would be difficult even for them to do um so

6:03 that is how we ultimately succeed now that's just one element of our uh business that cloud provider component

6:10 we also have a thriving service provider business and an enterprise business and the name of the game there really is

6:17 around um innovation it can't just be about hardware speeds and feeds um making sure

6:25 that the you can keep up with their traffic demands because honestly that's just become tables table stakes we're

6:31 changing the game right now and innovating in areas like artificial intelligence

6:36 every day changing skeptics in ai into believers moving ai from what is

6:43 traditionally been powerpoint to actual practice and achieving real outcomes so

6:48 we can go to an enterprise customer for example and say i can give you the fastest time the

6:54 deployment of a new network in your business or the fewest number of trouble

6:59 tickets or the fastest time to resolution of trouble tickets you know these are the areas that you need to

7:04 innovate in in order to thrive in this industry so is that the

7:10 main value of ai then in the space where you're operating is

7:17 simplifying the implementation process for customers absolutely the analogy i like to use is

7:24 kind of like the self-driving car you know in many ways we're moving uh the industry the automobile industry

7:30 to self-driving what does that mean it's gonna radically change the face of cities no more need for parking lots

7:38 much safer fewer lives lost as a result of what is inevitably coming there is a

7:44 similar need and i believe a destiny that's going to happen in this industry towards the

7:50 self-driving network a network that essentially doesn't require human beings to ensure that things stay up that it

7:57 performs well and that's great because ultimately you want humans to focus on the much more strategic components of

8:04 their business you want to focus them on new revenue streams competing against upstarts or trying to disrupt them and

8:12 the best way to do that is to free their their their time from just keeping the lights on of getting the dreaded 3am

8:19 call because you know something has gone wrong in the network and the business is being affected as a result of that

8:25 that's what we're striving to achieve and i'm you know super happy to report that it's not really just a matter of

8:31 a vision anymore we're demonstrating this to our customers and i think we're reaping the benefits from a business

8:37 performance standpoint now what about areas like industrial iot um

8:43 over the last few months talked to a number of different companies executives uh across the ecosystem qualcomm

8:51 reported some big numbers of growth there you know talked to some startups who are working on 5g

8:57 in this area um and i i wonder about it particularly

9:03 because there also seems to be this overall technology trend toward okay the overall blanket horizontal promise has

9:10 been made for the potential of things like iot ai etc but really delivering on

9:16 the promise it seems is going to take specific industry solutions and people

9:21 who have knowledge of those industries and can connect the technology's potential into the customer's need and

9:28 especially in this economy being able to kind of generate revenue not just kind

9:34 of good feelings um seems especially important so so how does that in industry focus and that

9:42 vertical focus fit into your strategy and what needs to be done yeah you know it used to be at juniper

9:49 that the first problems we were solving as we were building our first products that helped the internet scale at the time of the dot-com boom

9:56 was around connecting people and the internet was essentially doubling every few months and we were a

10:03 small startup and that was our timing was impeccable because we were trying to sell to some conservative buyers that

10:09 didn't really want to bet their networks on startups but they had no choice because we were the only ones that could provide them with a solution to keep up

10:15 with that insatiable demand that's generated by humans today it's not just about humans

10:21 as you mentioned it's really about connecting literally everything and

10:27 the one thing that we have learned is that when you're trying to connect things and not humans is that

10:33 delivering that experience that i was just talking about that an incredible end user experience becomes even more

10:38 important when you're connecting humans in an office environment um and things don't go wrong humans will pick up the

10:44 phone and say you know the wi-fi sucks uh something is broken uh when you're connecting things

10:50 let's say you're connecting robots in a warehouse environment they typically don't have that capability and so the

10:58 uptime of the network the performance of the network the network being not just up but actually functioning properly and

11:04 your ability to consume metrics that give you the confidence the assurance that it's functioning properly becomes

11:11 of paramount importance which is why this ai driven self-driving network

11:16 concept that i've just described very much applies to large warehouses factories where there

11:22 are robots and machines that are being connected so they can do their day-to-day uh work it's a it's a great

11:29 opportunity for us and one that fits right into our areas of strength

11:34 now you've been at juniper for um a long time yeah so

11:40 i i want you to put this moment um economically the broader environment

11:47 into perspective how challenging is it um

11:53 is there anything that you compare it to whether we're talking late 90s early 2000s financial crisis etc

12:01 you know no i think it's somewhat unique at this point in time first if you look at the pandemic and what

12:08 that has done to the economy if anything it has highlighted

12:14 and put a spotlight on the importance of our industry right i mean think about where we would

12:19 be if we didn't have a network that would keep us connected with our families

12:25 uh keep our kids educated enable us to get health care to do commerce to do

12:31 business and if anything i think the pandemic has highlighted and

12:37 accelerated the value proposition that we have always been delivering

12:43 at juniper so that in some sense yes the pandemic presented headwinds but it also

12:49 provided some tailwinds if you will for our industry and then the supply chain challenge is definitely unique i i have

12:55 been at juniper for as you mentioned a long time 25 years or so and we've never

13:01 experienced anything that has been this broad-based and touched so many different elements

13:06 of our business and it really has taught us to up our game and execution and how we work with our contract manufacturers

13:13 our semiconductor partners and and so on okay so um we've talked about juniper

13:21 and the industry i want to come back to that uh when we talk about the vision going forward but now i want to learn

13:27 some more about you um and i like to start at the beginning so tell me uh where were you born

13:34 tell me about the household parents siblings yeah so i was born in beirut lebanon of

13:40 palestinian descent i left the middle east when i was very young and i moved west to canada that's where we

13:46 ultimately immigrated as a child at two sisters an older and a younger sister

13:51 um my father was an engineer and

13:56 you know my mom was uh somebody that really put a lot of pressure on us to con to work hard at

14:01 school both my parents instilled the strong sense of work ethics in me and in my

14:08 sisters i think my father's career choice of being an engineer he was a civil engineer definitely was an

14:14 inspiration to me ultimately choosing a career in engineering i've now lived in

14:20 the u.s for the longest in my life so i'm a proud american and i've grown deep roots here with two

14:26 children a loving wife a wonderful career um you know this is this is my

14:31 home now so tell me about uh early memories 70s 80s

14:38 in canada what what do you remember from that period middle child um

14:45 well i'll tell you that what ultimately got me into technology was probably when

14:51 my parents bought for myself and my sisters our first personal computer in

14:56 fact i remember it was an ibm pc junior uh which was a very interesting device and

15:03 i have to say i was intrigued fascinated immediately hooked to it and i tried i

15:10 was trying to figure out what to do with it but i have to say ultimately the thing that got me to really

15:16 be inspired by it is when computer graphics started to become a thing and graphics software became available and

15:24 affordable to households and when i ultimately bought my first

15:30 graphics programming or software program i ended up

15:36 marrying a creative side that i had in me to technology and i would lock myself in my room for hours and hours maybe

15:43 even days on end and just create art on the computer and ultimately that sort of gave me this belief that i needed to

15:50 choose a career not just in technology but in computer graphics and in fact the first part of my career the first

15:56 company i worked for in canada when i graduated from my undergraduate school the university of toronto is a company

16:02 called ati technologies which built graphics processors and now is actually

16:08 a part of amad yeah yeah exactly tell me about tell me about the

16:13 artistic side like when you got the pc around you were 12 years old but let's go back even earlier

16:19 than that um what were you into outside of school artistic expression

16:25 uh activities what so on the artistic front i i spent a lot of time drawing um

16:33 painting you know that was my outlet that was the way in which i balanced

16:39 what i also did which is a lot of hard work and studying for school um and i did that you know on

16:46 traditional pen and paper prior to moving to uh doing it on computers and

16:52 um i still sort of have a lot of that in me today but let's just say i don't have the patience nor do i have a lot of the

16:58 time for it outside of that what were you drawing oh everything it it really depended on

17:06 what was inspiring me so i i remember i i spent the summer learning how to windsurf so i draw a picture of

17:12 windsurfers i was into automobiles i draw a picture of my favorite cars i was into the toronto maple leafs the hockey

17:18 hockey team up in toronto canada i draw a picture of you know the goalie for the toronto maple leafs at the time ken

17:24 regett so it's just whatever was top of mind whatever was inspiring me i did do

17:30 the canadian thing i played hockey for a few years um i played a couple of instruments but i never really stuck to

17:36 anything i was sort of one of those kids that moved around from hobby to hobby pretty quickly was everybody

17:42 comfortable with that were you comfortable with that i mean these days um people are really into specialization

17:48 i personally think too into specialization i went to a liberal arts school i like to dabble in a lot of things i see value in that but i mean

17:55 you know a lot of times parents will want their kids to focus on math and science and engineering and be

18:01 freaked out if they want to be artistic what was the situation for you no i honestly i i couldn't be happier

18:10 and more proud of my parents than the fact that my parents just gave me a lot of leeway and a lot of support

18:16 irrespective of whatever career choices that i you know i decided on

18:23 now i will say that i definitely had an inspiration from my dad not because of

18:28 pressure that he put on me but i saw the passion he had for

18:33 building and creating things now he was a civil engineer so he built buildings and bridges and things of that nature i

18:40 ultimately chose a path on my own of electrical engineering and it became about building

18:46 you know different things chips to be uh honest quite uh initially and then moving on into networking from there

18:53 tell me about your dad's passion for building you know ethnically palestinian

18:58 in um lebanon there's a lot of destruction happening right there's a lot that's

19:03 being torn down so somebody who wants to build that's probably more than just physical and literal in that sense right

19:11 absolutely i mean my dad um worked at a time when the need for construction in the middle east was

19:17 absolutely there and he built everything from hospitals to bridges to

19:23 um you know office buildings when he moved to canada i believe for there was a period of time where he helped in

19:29 building nuclear power plants so he had a pretty robust career and i remember growing up

19:35 i was extremely proud of what i was seeing and ultimately that definitely had an effect on my

19:41 career choice to move into engineering and he actually he would tell me he'd say look the future is going to be more

19:48 around technology it's going to be more around computers and electronics so if you do choose a path in engineering then

19:53 you sort of um let's just say encourage me to consider a path that's more in the future of

19:59 engineering engineering around computers and technology uh at what point did

20:06 you really start to from uh academic perspective capitalize on that

20:13 so you know moving to the west to canada when i was a child

20:19 english was a second language i was i felt sort of out of place

20:24 uh and and honestly school didn't come easily for me

20:29 but i was motivated what grade were you when you made that probably grade three but i was

20:36 motivated to really improve and so i'd go the extra mile i had

20:42 lessons after school um in everything from math to english

20:48 and i remember i put in the hours i don't know why but i really did pull in the pull in the hours and i think it was

20:54 very much the the values of work ethic that my parents instilled in us all of

21:00 us as children at the time and i just got better and better and so

21:05 you know by the time i got into junior high school or middle school as they say here in the u.s and then ultimately high

21:11 school i certainly like to have fun i had a lot of friends but i worked very hard as well um you know

21:18 and ultimately that led to an ability to pursue a career in engineering and the ability to go to university of toronto

21:24 and ultimately to stanford to get my master's degree i would be remiss if i didn't ask about

21:30 your mom um and what her influence was both on

21:36 the ethic right the work ethic and also on the specific interests that you had

21:42 you know i think with my mom she was just the um

21:48 always uh supportive you know it was basically unconditional love and support

21:55 irrespective of the decisions that we ultimately made in our lives

22:01 and i think that just took a lot of pressure off of us as kids growing up in that household

22:07 knowing that we could pursue a career in anything that we ultimately wanted and we would have that level of support is

22:14 everything and i've learned so much from my mom um as i rage my teenage kids uh

22:20 today okay so let's let's talk about um post

22:26 college and go back and get anything from college that we need to but you mentioned ati and i remember you know

22:32 ati and and amd sort of getting together um but after the well during the period

22:40 there which wasn't too long how did that start to blend your

22:46 artistic visual interests into your technology interest and um why did you

22:52 leave so i left ati not because i there was anything wrong with ati technologies i

22:58 was drawn to the action in silicon valley i saw that there was something special

23:04 happening in silicon valley and honestly i just wanted a piece of it and and i also thought i'd move to

23:10 silicon valley and pursue a career in computer graphics so i came down

23:15 silicon valley i um started my master's degree at stanford by the time i was graduating i did an

23:21 internship i actually did an internship at a company that was in graphics

23:26 but i honestly got bored in that internship because that was a company that just didn't challenge me

23:33 enough and i think it was based on that borden that i thought oh you know what let me

23:39 spread my wings a little bit see what else is out there um look at other problems that need to

23:45 be solved and came across this problem of the network the internet and it was the

23:52 right time to be looking at that problem because it was just at the beginning of the dot-com boom

23:58 um none of the traditional technology at the time could keep pace with the

24:03 explosion of traffic in the global network and i figured you know what that will be the problem that i'm going to

24:10 pursue my career in and i came across a tiny little startup of around 20 people or so called juniper

24:16 networks and they you know convinced them that they need to take a shot at me straight out

24:22 of stanford university and the rest is fate i guess and it's so

24:28 uh unique because as you said you've been at juniper for more than 25 years

24:35 um usually to get to some next level at some point people

24:40 need to leave a company either because the existing leadership doesn't want to sort of get

24:46 out of the way or internal politics or whatever what is different about juniper how have

24:53 you managed to stay there for a quarter century yeah um

24:59 you know first i can't i could not be more grateful of

25:04 the opportunities that juniper has presented me and my recipe for success has never been

25:10 around creating this five five-year or 10-year career arc a plan that i was methodically

25:18 pursuing it was always around the here and now it was always around

25:23 getting recognized by building a reputation of being able to get stuff

25:29 done and ultimately when that next opportunity would emerge and inevitably

25:35 in a good company they're going to emerge you raise your hand and because you've built this track record uh

25:42 a a reputation of of getting projects done on time with

25:48 high quality you're always going to be considered for that next step now you don't always get to

25:55 you know take that next step but at least you will be considered that's the recipe that worked time and time again

26:02 for me at juniper all the way from an individual contributor working on the smallest pieces of logic on our first

26:10 piece of semiconductor that went into our very first router through the engineering ranks into

26:15 product management into general management and then right up to the point of uh becoming the ceo of the of

26:22 the company that has been the recipe that has worked for me and you know i think it can work for others as well

26:27 like there's a bit of a lost art if you will in our industry of sticking around and rising through the ranks so

26:34 maybe i'm a rare case but i think i'm a case that can apply to others as well well especially now and i think it's not

26:41 all the workers fault that the relationship between company and workers become pretty transactional in a lot of cases

26:49 in some ways perhaps um the compensation and equity influences that

26:55 hey let me go someplace younger newer where there's more upside potential if i'm going to be paid that

27:01 way perhaps it's just the narrative in silicon valley and how that's shifted over time so how do you

27:08 um how should you reset that narrative so that it

27:14 encourages that kind of longevity yeah so you're now talking about a problem that i think is definitely here and now

27:20 in silicon valley i mean the ability to attract and retain talent now in the valley is not easy right it's an

27:26 incredibly tight labor market and it's a very competitive

27:32 workforce market today so it is definitely something that's top of mind it is definitely a part of my

27:37 responsibilities as a ceo of this company and i really think it comes down to a couple of different things first

27:43 um is compensation you've got to be competitive right and with wage inflation and so forth that's

27:49 becoming more and more of a challenge but you have to do what you need to do second

27:55 i do think there is a culture aspect of this it's people are devoting so much of their

28:01 time to working with their colleagues you have to make work a place where they can

28:07 do their best work where they feel like they have a voice where they feel like they can they're included

28:12 that they have the support from their managers especially over the last couple of years as we've been going through this pandemic the importance of human

28:19 leadership has become you know just paramount um and then the last thing and

28:26 especially i think this is true for a technology company it certainly is true for me and why i stuck around is people

28:32 want to latch on to a mission that they believe in and i think juniper is very much a

28:38 mission-driven company yes we're building great solutions for the client to cloud the ai driven enterprise but

28:45 ultimately what does that mean we're helping our kids get educated we're helping researchers find cures for

28:51 deadly diseases where you know enabling service providers to provide health care across

28:57 remote barren lands i mean these are things that to me are exceptionally motivating and have kept

29:05 me here at juniper so articulating that narrative when you're when you're marketing your products we don't just

29:10 look at this as marketing our products to our customers we're actually marketing them to our employees to prospective

29:16 employees um and i think that's become more important the rev than ever in this day and age

29:22 let me just take a kind of blind um

29:28 whack at this and ask about a period in your career when maybe you might have

29:33 left juniper and specifically right around the financial crisis i mean it's early

29:39 in your management the management part of your career and tenure there i think you were

29:46 what vice president of product management i imagine

29:51 customer budgets are shrinking perhaps even juniper for some period of time is shrinking

29:57 and then even as things start to turn around in the industry in general maybe

30:02 you got offers to go elsewhere that might look attractive did that happen um yeah i mean certainly i've

30:09 been a company for so long that uh offers have come and gone but but if i were to pick a moment and

30:16 there's more than one but let me just pick one early 2000s there was an industry challenge that was

30:22 happening um juniper had largely been seen as a company that had missed a big

30:30 networking technology trend around carrier ethernet you know ethernet was traditionally this lan technology at

30:37 technology that connected devices inside of an enterprise now was moving out into

30:42 the carrier space and we were slow to embrace that and many people had countered us out and

30:49 so it was a low point not just for me but for the company and we saw a lot of attrition i i lost a lot of good friends

30:57 and colleagues at the time but i discovered something about myself which is that you know when the tough

31:03 get going you either sort of give up throwing the towel or you prove the skeptics wrong and i think i'm more of

31:10 the latter i wanted to prove even my friends that had decided to abandon us

31:15 that they made the wrong decision so we dug our heels i remember it was a very small team of people we just

31:22 camped out inside of a meeting room and just started to think about all the necessary decisions build by partner to

31:29 build what would be a late but good enough carrier ethernet products to meet the

31:35 market demands and we did just that we in fact that was the the genesis of the

31:40 mx product line in the company that ended up being one of the most successful products in the industry and

31:46 the most successful product today at juniper so i often tell my team you know pressure can kill you but it can also

31:53 create diamonds and in this case it created a diamond a multi multi billion dollar diamond for the company how did

32:00 you get from good enough to a diamond you know

32:06 i think the talent at juniper has always been and continues to be off the charts

32:13 amazing and that's another thing that has kept me here john i'm always learning here i have never

32:20 ever in my career felt like i am the smartest guy in in the room

32:26 and there are always people to learn from whether it be on the technology side the business side finance you name it so i i really do think it just comes

32:34 down to having exceptional talent that managed to create a product from semiconductor

32:40 all the way through the software stack that was just superior higher performance lower power

32:46 consumption more programmability more flexibility than what was out there and our customers saw that and you know

32:53 bought lots of it but surely there must have been strategy behind okay let's get i don't want to call it

32:59 necessarily the minimum viable product out to show that we've got a stake in this area where people think we've mixed

33:06 missed it but then to apply the right amount of talent and resource to it

33:11 to grow our capability more quickly than the competition who do you put in charge

33:16 of that is that a big team or a small team how is it constituted do you keep it in the same

33:22 workspace as everybody else or do you split it out like how do you go from from good enough to a main company

33:30 driver well because this was such a big decision for the company this was a ceo

33:36 level decision that needed to be made we could either buy our way into the market we

33:41 could partner our way or we could build now i was an engineer at the time or probably more of a product management

33:48 manager at the time so working closely with engineers defining the products and ultimately working on you know the

33:54 execution of the products so i chose the path of build and i ultimately had to sell it i mean

34:01 it wasn't you know after locking ourselves in this room brainstorming filling up white boards

34:08 literally from florida uh ceiling with uh grand plans of how we're gonna build

34:14 this incredible product ultimately once we landed on something that we felt was compelling it came down

34:22 to selling the concept selling the vision to the decision makers and because this

34:27 was such a big decision for the company it really did rise to um the ceo this is the cto the chief

34:34 technical officer of the company and you know i think they made the right decision and in retrospect i think we can all say we made the right decision

34:42 okay so at what point uh presumably after this did you figure out that you might want to be ceo

34:50 to be perfectly honest never i i never had my sights

34:55 on becoming ceo but that said i was very ambitious

35:01 uh so that's why you know i felt if i became ceo that's awesome but you know there's i'm gonna need to take some

35:07 steps along the way uh and that's why i bring it the way i did i said might wanna be ceo

35:14 not that you're like macbeth and you're gonna you know knife anybody in your way including but i mean um at what point

35:21 did you think okay uh within the realm of possibility of my time here at

35:27 juniper i could run this place if if uh the board needs me to and you know if i'm in

35:34 that position that's something that's within the realm of possibility for me okay i see what you're asking right now

35:39 i think when i was uh when i became the head of the platform systems

35:45 division basically responsible for all products development uh strategy

35:51 road maps in the company uh reporting directly to the ceo and i

35:57 saw what it was like and the decisions that needed to be made and the challenges that had to be faced

36:04 uh and this was probably around a few years let's say three four five years before

36:11 the opportunity to actually take the ceo job became available

36:17 what was it about that proximity and the level of responsibility and access you had

36:24 that that made that something that you saw was possible

36:29 i guess when you see it firsthand um you understand the topics the

36:35 discussions the decisions i'm not saying that i felt like okay

36:42 this is easy i could do it that was never my style never my character uh but

36:47 i definitely started to build the confidence that these are skills that i

36:52 can acquire and ultimately having that chair at the

36:58 ceo table gave me that confidence that allowed me to raise my hand and

37:04 take the ceo job when it became available okay now i always

37:10 like to ask about an experience i call death valley the lowest point because i think how one gets through that is

37:18 instructive yep so we talked a bit about early 2000s and juniper's difficulties

37:24 but for you individually personally what was the toughest time

37:31 either career-wise or personally where perhaps you thought that you know

37:37 whatever path you were on you were going to have to make a dramatic change well

37:43 that early 2000s point was an example of that because it was actually quite tough on me and everybody at

37:50 juniper to persevere through what was a pretty difficult time period for the company

37:56 but that was not the you know the only time um

38:03 every career step i took was a big decision for me but some were

38:10 bigger than others so we talked about moving to become a ceo but there were other earlier ones maybe

38:16 one of the most important decisions that i took and yes you could say it was a tough decision and i think that's the

38:23 nature of the question that you're asking john was making the career choice to move

38:28 from an engineering track to a business track right i was very happy being an engineer i loved

38:35 technology i loved building products but i felt like there was something that was missing but i didn't know if that

38:42 itch was strong enough to risk everything on the engineering track and move to becoming a product manager and

38:48 ultimately a general manager and i remember really really struggling with that decision i didn't know if i would

38:54 be good at it i didn't know if i would like it and i ultimately it was a leap of faith to

39:02 um make that shift um and fortunately not only did i find

39:07 that i you know was pretty decent at it i actually loved it i loved that marriage

39:13 of technology uh products and strategy the ability to communicate and

39:19 talk to our customers and partners that was such a i don't know a great mix

39:24 of skills that i was building at the time so i felt it was the right decision for sure

39:30 that's that's important i think what i'm more asking about more than uncertainty is failure and loss

39:37 right um aside from that early 2000s period of uncertainty in the kind of the company

39:42 missing it what was the the hardest lowest uh moment that maybe prompted some

39:50 self-doubt even well you know throughout my

39:57 uh career in engineering i worked on products that i put my heart and soul into that ultimately were

40:05 cancelled when you are an engineer you don't necessarily see the business

40:10 logic behind that you what you see are people that are you know ripping the baby out of your hands uh the thing that

40:17 you have devoted so much of your time and your attention um and your you know cycles to for years

40:23 and years um so there were examples of of that there were products that we built for

40:29 markets you know certain elements of the service provider market that ultimately

40:35 didn't see light of day and for an engineer that has devoted so much of their time to it that was a very dark

40:40 difficult decision but i see those types of decisions now in a different light

40:46 you know i see them as sometimes you've got to make sacrifices in specific areas for the greater good

40:52 of the company and i understand them of course much more now than i did back then

40:57 okay so um i don't know if you want to take one of those in particular whether it

41:03 was the first or you know the one that you work hardest on or maybe one

41:08 sometimes you know the c-suite's got to make decisions um and you understand why they made the decision but you still you

41:14 know know that they made the wrong decision in the long term but what did you um

41:20 what did you get from that experience and not just the knowledge that eventually

41:26 um big decisions have to be made but getting through that experience of having something that

41:32 you believed in um canceled destroyed mothballed yeah what did that

41:39 what did getting through that do for you back then i have to be honest what i got was just a whole bunch of heartache

41:46 about it but i will say today if i reflect back on those difficult

41:52 periods in time castle products you know the pressures of the early 2000s all of those

41:59 challenges each and every one of them have created who i am as a leader today so

42:06 take for example one of those um product cancellations i think you've got to be empathetic

42:13 with people in your company when they are impacted negatively

42:18 by decisions uh and i've always said to my team it's important to be kind as a

42:24 leader and some people misconstrue that they confuse that with being weak as a leader no not at all as

42:31 a leader you're on the hook to make tough decisions sometimes decisions that can

42:36 impact people in negative ways but always do it with respect and with

42:41 dignity and and face up to it so if i were to make a decision now that impacted people in a negative way take

42:48 for example engineers that have products that they've been working on that are essentially going to get mothballed i

42:54 will go and talk to them directly and try to describe and explain the business logic behind such a decision and you

43:01 know what some of them might understand it and i hope that they would understand it some of them by not might not do it

43:06 but i think it's important as a leader to take that step nonetheless what are what are the elements and

43:13 you're getting to some of them of that kind of kindness right you're separating it from weakness you're still doing it

43:18 you're still mothballing the thing um but you're uh

43:24 you're visiting and doing it you're doing it in person you're doing it i don't know what what would you say are

43:30 the pieces of delivering that hard information doing that hard thing

43:36 that yeah that build in kindness well you know as a leader and certainly

43:42 that includes as a ceo so much of your job is communication

43:48 and it's selling right you're selling stock to investors products to to

43:53 your customers and partners you're selling a vision to your employees and you're also selling decisions that

44:00 you make to your stakeholders that includes your employees so when you so in that example that i

44:07 just provided about being kind kindness is essentially giving the

44:12 respect to those in your team to and by giving them the time to

44:17 explain to them the logic behind the difficult decisions that you make and again i have to

44:24 emphasize that it's by no means saying you don't make the difficult decisions you do have to make them but you owe

44:31 your team the respect and dignity to explain them and if you can do that i think you've got much more loyal

44:38 teammates that will stick around and support you it sounds like tell me if i'm reading

44:44 too much into this part of explaining is taking the time to think about

44:49 where your audience is what their starting point is of expectation

44:55 of emotion of commitment and then you know bridging from the information that

45:01 you have but starting from where they are as opposed to i'm dropping this decision down and

45:08 maybe i'll listen for when it hits you but maybe not absolutely the case i think you've

45:13 described it really well and you could probably just summarize it in that word of empathy right you have to be able to

45:19 put yourself in their shoes and to explain it in a way that really resonates with them now you

45:26 know i was an engineer i was a technologist i was literally in their shoes so i would have the

45:33 unique ability to express the decision in the right way to explain it but then

45:39 also to connect it to the success of the company and of course when we were talking about the success

45:44 of the company you have to explain that that is how we all succeed at the end of the day it's the success of the company

45:50 that gives us the ability to invest in new exciting areas to invest in new products and solutions

45:56 now is empathy harder to pull off with a hybrid and remote workforce

46:04 to be perfectly honest yes i i'm i think the last few years we have

46:11 demonstrated that we can be productive like i know people say but we've been so productive

46:16 in a remote environment and that's true i don't think anybody can argue with that we've shipped products we've hit

46:22 schedules we've met budgets we've done all that but i think there are there is a

46:28 downside to pure virtual that's not immediately observable it's something that takes

46:35 time to become observable and i don't necessarily think is very positive and that is what you're saying this ability

46:41 to empathize to connect to connect at a human level uh with people i mean i

46:46 think about all of the employees that we've hired over the last couple of years that have

46:51 many cases not even met in person their peers or their managers now that's

46:57 slowly changing fortunately but that is a big disadvantage especially when it comes to the issues around talent

47:04 attraction and talent retention that we were just talking about so um

47:09 pure remote i'm not a big fan of hybrid where there will be periods of time where people get together and work

47:16 face to face in person i think is the new normal and i think it's important

47:21 yeah i think about this a lot particularly when it comes to early career often younger

47:28 employees because what's what's bonding them not just to the career or to the

47:33 industry but to the place if not the relationships with the people and

47:38 the idea that some of these people you know mid-career managers senior executives actually know and care about

47:46 me and so i i get the hybrid thing uh i like flexible environments myself but it

47:52 also seems to me like if you're gonna do that boy you gotta just be a ninja in those two or three days a week that

47:59 you're together you gotta get everything exactly right and hit all the emotional notes because

48:05 you've got you know you're taking fewer shots so you got to make a higher percentage it's it's so true i i do think people

48:12 are starting to think much more uh strategically you know thoughtfully about how they're

48:19 going to leverage their time in the office when they're um you know face-to-face with their peers uh we've

48:25 started to do that my leadership team and i we've arranged our schedules our calendars so that the meetings that we

48:32 have that we schedule on our calendars are on days where we are going to be in the office and i've seen

48:38 um that you know the the bonds the dynamics between the team absolutely

48:45 improve as we increase the frequency of meeting in person look at at the end

48:50 of the day we are humans we are social creatures and there is only so much you

48:56 can do over a video link and i say this as a ceo of a networking company where you

49:02 know we benefit a lot from uh those that are leveraging the network for remote collaboration

49:08 yeah i mean look we're having we're having this conversation remotely now but you know eventually i hope we're

49:14 gonna have lunch or we're gonna have dinner um because you know that that's how uh relationships also build and grow

49:21 so i i wanna go back to um juniper

49:27 specifically strategically in the vision from here we're getting into this a little bit at the beginning of the

49:32 conversation but as we look toward the end of 2022 into 2023 and the main

49:40 macro factors and industry needs that are going to drive the demand

49:46 for the kind of technology that you produce what is it really that's going to

49:52 that you're going to focus on that's going to differentiate you so you know the big

49:57 trends that we're looking at that are happening now first digital transformation you know

50:03 the network has become not a nice to have but a absolute

50:08 must-have for any company that's going through any form of digital transformation and it can't just be

50:14 you know a best effort network it's got to be a network that provides an assured and

50:20 a secured experience to those that are using it second it's complexity complexity has become

50:26 this thing that has bogged us all down in this industry it has slowed down

50:32 customers across all segments of the market in some cases downright crippling

50:38 innovation and progress and as people come back to the office albeit gradually

50:44 nobody is rushing towards more on-prem complexity really is around

50:49 leveraging the cloud by simplifying um the i.t experience so how

50:56 are we pursuing this what does this mean for juniper this is what the net the network for the next decade is all about

51:01 we're changing the game with artificial intelligence we're changing believers as skeptics and

51:07 ai into actual believers i think we're achieving real outcomes with our ai that

51:13 are defeating complexity simplifying the lives of network operators and making it

51:18 so that those that are using the network to live work and play are actually trusting the network for their most

51:25 important applications irrespective of where they are in the office at home or

51:30 anywhere else that is our opportunity we've we have a juniper a 50 billion

51:35 plus market opportunity of which you know we are just a few points of market share so the

51:41 sky's the limit in terms of where we can take this company well we can use some of that uh optimism

51:48 uh in these economic times and and in these markets Rami Rahim ceo of juniper networks thanks

51:55 for sharing the juniper story and vision in your own story and vision as well really

52:01 enjoyed it thanks so