Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
This week on Culture Leaders Daily, we bring you my conversation with Doug Merritt, the chairman, CEO, and President of Aviatrix. I really love talking to Doug. He has a fascinating philosophy about life that informs his entire style of leadership. And when I spoke to him, I feel like something clicked, something I have been trying to figure out about my entire career that he answered so eloquently. First of all, he said there’s no such thing as failure, just opportunities for learning. And his employees are not beholden to outcomes, but to showing up every day building habits and putting in the work. And when something doesn’t go to plan, he’ll take the feedback and build it into a plan for tomorrow. It’s something we talk about all the time, taking accountability for what is in your control and letting the rest play out. He talks about a learning culture that goes way beyond training programs and communication and is really about behavioral habits that drive results without being overly focused on results. And that’s where both people and profitability win. We dive into Doug’s success at Aviatrix and his previous company, Splunk, where he led the transition from an onsite software company to a full cloud-based service. It’s a great case study for the power of an adaptable accountable company culture, and Doug has a ton of insight into building a culture that prioritizes learning and growth generally. So please welcome to the podcast Doug Merritt. Doug, thank you so much for joining us. So what is your why?

Doug Merritt:
Well, thank you for having me here, Jessica, I love your standard format. Great opening question. Great opening question. Dig deep actually now I’m going to ask all of my leaders, what is your why in my

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
That’s great

Doug Merritt:
Leadership team?

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Great. I do that with candidates, by the way, when I’m interviewing people, that’s my first question. What’s your why?

Doug Merritt:
It’s a great question. I love it. So I’ve actually been pretty consistent on this for most of my life. My why is all about learning, growth and development.
I attach deeply to the thought that, and I’ve worked my entire life on this by the way, and I’ve failed at this a lot. But there is no failure, there is no success either. But failure, we tend to gravitate more to more. There’s only learnings. We’re here to learn and to experience and to grow. And if you can actually make that happen, you’re much more in the moment. You’re much more focused on the process. You’re focused on daily habits, you’re focused on mastery and the small details. And again, lifelong challenge with translating life is about learning, growth and development to now how do I actually live that every single day? But that is what truly motivates me. And something I’m curious about because I love your podcast and what you are driving is what is your why?

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Oh shoot, first time it’s ever gotten turned on me. I always have to find a way to say it so that I can talk about me a little bit. Thank you for asking, Doug. My why is to serve God and others.

Doug Merritt:
That’s a great one.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
It’s a good one, right? It’s pretty all encompassing. I mean it’s

Doug Merritt:
Hard

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
To forget too. I like to keep it simple. So can we go back on one thing you said that I actually love and I want to dig into because I think this is solid learning for people out there in the world. You said there is no failure. I totally agree with the premise, but can you tell us because there are people out there thinking, what do you mean there’s no failure? Of course there’s failure

Doug Merritt:
And I’ll go one step deeper that I’ve really been working on. There is no suffering. There’s

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
No wait, no wait. I thought everything is suffering, life is suffering and there is no failure. I’m not on board with the ner suffering. I suffer. I know.

Doug Merritt:
Okay, tell us. So I’m working on it. It’s a lifelong, and this will, I’ll tie this to what I’m trying to do with business also because it’s part of why I came back to work instead of Sam retired. But if you really have that mindset of there is no failure if life is about learning, if you start there that God put us here so that we could learn, grow, experience, we’re all perfect the way we are perfectly imperfect, then there’s you need feedback. The only way you can learn is to get feedback and celebrating a success or taking get too much ego. Satisfaction of success robs you of that learning and having too much regret or being too consumed by failure robs you of the learning. If every moment is just an opportunity to learn and to improve and to connect with others and to again try and be present, then failure is beautiful. It’s a feedback loop. It’s how else are you going to learn? Our label is failure. Label is

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Okay. I love that. And I went to a self-help seminar when I was 20 years old that taught me that there is no failure and I’ve never forgotten it. And the story they told to teach that lesson was they said, let’s say you want to ask a girl out. What do you have at the beginning of that process? You have no date with the girl. Then you ask the girl out and she says, no, have you failed? No, nothing’s happened. Nothing changed. You still don’t have take with the girl nothing, right? It’s like let’s say you want to take a company to IPO and you don’t have a public company and then you fail to IPO. Well, you still don’t have a public company. Nothing’s happened, right? But explain that there is no suffering because it can feel painful if you fail at something that you wanted to happen.

Doug Merritt:
It definitely does. And this is, so there’s the contrarian approach that I’m trying to drive. A lot of work we have to do at Aviatrix to achieve some of the goals, outcomes that we want is trying to release people from the outcomes and the goals and focus on the rigor of daily habits, daily processes really be in the moment. And that is insanely controversial. I know that there are huge chunks of our employee population. What are you talking about? I’m a sales exec. Of course I’ve got goals and outcomes. If I don’t hit my quota, I’m a failure. And right now it’s like, well, I want the company to progress also. But if you over rotate on the outcome, you miss the daily learnings. And right now we’re in daily learning phase. If you want to climb a mountain, you can’t just stare at the peak the entire time you’re going to fall and never achieve your objective.
You’ve got to focus on the steps in front of you. And of course the mountain’s there and you want to eventually get up the mountain, but the mountain is an outcome of the daily rigor and the focus in that daily process. It doesn’t happen without that daily rigor. So again, there are failures for sure because we set our mind to, I want to learn to play tennis. I want to, it’s going to be public. I want to hit my quota or code this beautiful module within the product. And if you don’t achieve it, you didn’t achieve it, but that doesn’t mean you won’t achieve it next time. Going back to the asking the girl out, that doesn’t, if you only focus on the outcome and you only focus on failure or success, then again you’ve robbed yourself the opportunity of what was I supposed to learn on this journey?
And then the other piece is when you do achieve it, you set this crazy goal. I’m going to take this company public. And that was your purpose. That was your mission. Unlike serving God and serving others, your mission was, I want to take this company public. Then once you take it public, why do you even show up? Or if you don’t take it public, but if your goal going into a sports season is I want to win the national championship and halfway through the season you’re disqualified, you just haven’t won enough games, then why does everyone show up to practice? Why do you show up to a game? So it’s this nuance that I’m trying to drive within the company. Of course we have goals, we’ve got a board, we build a plan, we’re trying to hit the plan, so we got a plan, but then as soon as you launch the plan is kind of useless because everything changes so quickly anyway. And how do you focus back down on the process and the daily habits? And if you do that rigorously enough, you’ll get to I think an effective outcome. But if learning is the goal, you’ll for sure learn.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So Joe, Terry and I spend a lot of time talking about this because writing a book that’s going to come out later this year, and I mean my belief, and I think his belief too is that I’m responsible for the effort. God’s responsible for the outcome. And when you lead that way, it takes a lot of the pressure off because I can Joe’s my boss and every quarter I give him three big goals that I want to achieve in the quarter. And I set super high goals for myself because I know that he’s not going to see failure as some kind of personality character defect of mine. He knows that my effort is consistent and it’s committed and the outcome will be what it is right now. The way that shows up in business is really in the interactions I have with Joe. When we have conversations about performance and the executive calls, how does it show up beyond just your reactions and conversations? I mean, do you scale that philosophy at aviatrix?

Doug Merritt:
That’s what we are in the process of working on right now.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
How so? Where does it start? Where do we begin if that’s what we want to do?

Doug Merritt:
So I’ll give you an example. We have radically transformed the way that we’re going to market. We’ve got this really interesting software, refined, cloud architected networking platform. So very comprehensive does the way that networking, connecting something to something else has been done is generally a box orientation. And there’s all these boxes that do different pieces of the whole. So you’ve got a routing box or a network address translation box or a DNS in box or V VPNing box. And the thought process 15, 20 years ago is this is insanity. It’s a whole, why don’t we have a fabric that does this whole thing? And that’s what Aviatrix spoke to the cloud. But we were trying to sell the whole, we were trying to go into a company and say, we have this very comprehensive platform and you should replace everything you’re doing in AWS or Azure or Oracle OCI or Google with our platform.
And it wasn’t meeting a ton of success. It was such a big ask of people and there was so much risk involved and it’s so complex because the cloud vendors are better or worse took a box metaphor for the services they exposed. So they went back to the old data centers with the way that they are creating their offerings. And so we’ve refactored the entire go-to-market to be use case oriented that brings our platform. So instead of say asking a customer rethink your entire networking architecture, we’re now trying to insert in very specific business driven and cybersecurity driven use cases. We don’t know how to do that. We haven’t done that in four or five years. So it’s a complete relearning orientation within the company. And of course for that sales motion, we’ve got goals. We want a certain number of new logos. We want expansions within accounts, but I’m trying to refocus the entire account of, okay, we’ve got our goals, we’re about to set them for our next fiscal year, which starts February 1st.
All I care about is daily learnings. So we actually implemented daily standups, so we architected our account executives around a pod. They’ve got a business development rep attached to them, a systems engineer attached to them, a channel partner attached to them. And by the way, it is so hard, it’s such hard work because people resist this at the end of every single day, beginning of the day, meet with your pod plan what you’re doing end of the day, meet with your pod review what worked and didn’t work. And then to try and really emphasize it, we’re only doing a Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but we’ve got daily standard reviews where every team is on the call and you’re supposed to come forward with, here’s what I learned the past two days by trying to go to market in this different way. Here’s a call that worked, here’s a call that didn’t work.
We’re calling on the wrong buyer. We’ve got the wrong economic justification. The technical feasibility that we’re talking about isn’t actually working. Our pricing is off. What’s resonating in Germany isn’t resonating in uk, but just try and implement the, it’s just about learning. It’s just about learning. If we learn together, we will get a great outcome, but we have to focus on the daily learnings, which is in today’s society, I find it really, I think it’s always been hard, but we are so distracted with the life around us right now, the news cycle, the constant shifts that it’s hard to even gravitate to something long enough to digest it in today’s world I’ve found. And then to have people’s like sit on the learning, really go deep on this thing. It is fer. It’s very contrarian right now.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And so what is the resistance? Do people feel like they’re not learning something every day or two days or are they just not wanting to meet twice a day or why? Or is it just, oh, this is new, I don’t like it.

Doug Merritt:
I think it’s a combination of all the above. It is rigor. We really want you guys to meet every single day and we really want you to talk about it. And so it’s an extra step that you have to take and it really, you have to have low ego. You have to come in and admit, I don’t know the answers. I know I don’t know the answers. We’re
Going to market a new way and the only way I’m going to learn the answers is by listening to our entire go-to-market team and getting enough repeat insights that it’s like, okay, here’s the pattern, here’s how we adjust. And then I think so many people are focused on, they do have their monthly goals and their quarterly goals and it’s like all this time, if you just let me do it my way, I would be able to achieve these goals and it actually impacts my W2 or other countries equivalent of the W2 and my own feelings of success. And so there’s also a whole teamwork element of it of if one of us succeeds, but we’re not sharing with everybody else, it’s not going to help us. We’re all shareholders. We’ve got to work together as a team to understand what is the decoder ring for a velocity motion that we haven’t had in a long time.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
A decoder ring of a velocity motion. I mean that is a business jargony sentence right there. I didn’t even think about that question. Did you do this at

Doug Merritt:
Splunk? We were actually trying to at Splunk,
The core mechanism that AWS evangelized is instead of having quarterly business reviews, qbr, instead of even being crazy and having monthly business reviews, get down, do weekly business reviews, you’re a cloud company, which means you have all this information millisecond by millisecond. Why do we wait till the end of a month or a quarter to look back and learn? Why aren’t we learning much more frequently? So very counterculture within Splunk, because we were not cloud and my whole journey there was how do we get to be a cloud company? But as we got 50% of new contracts to be cloud oriented, I brought in a couple of a s leaders along the way. It’s like, all right, now we can start this weekly business review, this weekly learning. So it took a while for that to take traction. It was almost a year before it finally got some traction.
And then I wound up leaving Splunk and I’m not sure what actually happened to that approach, but it took us a while here at aviatrix also, I’ve been here a year and a half, and WBEI started with, okay, what’s our weekly learning mechanism? And then I backed off. It was too much task. And then three and a half months ago, we’d gained enough traction on analyzing the company and the markets and what our goals were and how we thought we should operate and we reinstituted them and they’re beginning to get traction. I’ve augmented those with this daily standup approach. So you try and take even one level more granular right now.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
I would love to dig into the cloud transformation at Splunk as an example of what it looks like to turn a ship that big that much into a completely different direction and talk about how culture played a part in that. Because I don’t think people understand how much of a behemoth of a task that is. What you did at Splunk was. It’s not like, oh, we’re going to pivot. It’s not like a pivot. It’s like turning Ford car manufacturing company into SiriusXM. It’s like a totally different customer. It’s a different product, it’s a different way of operating. It’s entirely different functions that need to support and you’re doing both at the same time while also transferring. And I mean I was at Oracle for 10 years and I was there for that Oracle journey when I invented the culture equation. Actually I was working for Sean Price who was the head of cloud, the guy that Mark hard brought in to create a company that was a cloud DNA company out of non-cloud DNA basically. So can you talk about the beginning of Splunk and you have this vision, what percentage of your revenue was cloud at the beginning versus at the end? And how did culture play a part in facilitating that transformation?

Doug Merritt:
Culture was critical, and it’s so nice to have someone that’s gone through it because most people do not understand how insanely disruptive it is. But when I started, when I joined Splunk, there was zero cloud. There had been an attempt to create a cloud delivery with brand new code before I got there and it didn’t wind up working. And the awesome leader that was CEO that brought me in, Godfrey Sullivan had killed that entirely and said, until we have a different approach, we’re going to punt and we’ll just keep selling on-prem customer traditional software. Then by the time I got to be CEO, he had reoriented, he’d begun the approach of, alright, we’ll just take our current code the way it is and throw it in the cloud and do self-manage, manage it on an individual by individual business basis for the customer base. So I took over, it was a quarter of a percent maybe, and we were six, we’re going to finish that year, a little bit over 600 million in revenue, which when as we took the cloud journey, annual recurring revenue turned out to be about a third of perpetual license. So that would’ve been about 200 million of a RR, but that was all on-prem license and over six and a half years, we went to almost 60% of bookings being from cloud and almost 30% of revenue being from cloud. And it was for sure the propellant for the company because the cloud growth way outpaced the on-prem growth with that.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So let’s break it down before you dig in. So you’re at the beginning of the journey and your employees start hearing, we’re going to start doing this cloud thing. And what they experience is, well wait a minute, are my skills going to be out of date? Am I going to get replaced? Will my job even exist? Because a lot of jobs stop existing and the fear that puts into the hearts and minds, and you’re seeing this with every company everywhere with ai, what is AI going to do to my job? It’s that equivalent, but 10 years ago. So how do you address the fear while painting a picture of a vision for the future that is in the company’s best interest, but employees can see, well, I don’t know anything about that and so I may not belong for this world, so I don’t want this to succeed. Where do you start when you have that challenge?

Doug Merritt:
So we actually started it my interview cycle with the board because I went through, they had external candidates and then I was the internal candidate really centered. I put together a whole PowerPoint presentation on this is what you get if you get me. We’re going to make this company a cloud company for this whole host of reasons. And the foundational reason was we had just seen our biggest customers get to a petabyte of data per day that they’re ingesting and managing, which for the listeners is a ridiculous amount of data. It’s very, very complex to be able to manage the infrastructure even in the cloud to be able to deal with that volume. And so when we looked at these were the top tech companies that we’re doing that are the top investment banking companies that have infinite talent is like the average company will never be able to manage this if we do not, if we believe that our mission, that data is one of the most important elements for survivability and decision making in the future, we’ve got to make it easy for the average customer to be able to manage this data, which means we’re going to have to manage it for them.
So we’ve got to get to the cloud. And then there was all kinds of Azure experience, Oracle, there’s a whole host of other benefits. Revenue is much more predictable. You get much more continuous customer integration and contacts, you can update things much more quickly. There’s a list of a thousand things. We started with a high level mission and I got bored buy-in when I said, if you don’t choose me, I love this company, count me in, I’ll work for whoever you choose, but if you do choose me, we’re going to basically throw a public company up into the air and see if we can put it back together and it might not actually get put back together. And they voted for that at the time. So that helped from the board down and then I had to get the entire executive team on board and I swap out a reasonable chunk of the executive team on what is the plan.
And we took almost nine months to interrogate all the aspects of the business. And again, plans are you need them to know where you’re going, but then we probably followed 30% of the plan because we found there are so many things that we thought that we knew that we didn’t know as we went along the way, but I wouldn’t have done it without the plan. But it was everything from what IT systems have to change to what do we have to do as far as skills and culture, what kind of people do we need and what kind of backgrounds do we have to recruit from and everything in between. And being a public company, I would not recommend this for the most executives as a public company, CEO, I think it just adds the multiplies complexity by 10 because if you’re smaller like Splunk and you only have one revenue line, unlike Oracle, which had a whole bunch of different revenue lines, the disruption that the investors are going to feel, which then means all the employees feel because it generally hits the stock price is pretty dramatic
Churn the revenue and the cost and the cash structures upside down. But so we had a plan and I made sure that as we brought in new EOT members, that we translated that plan and we had a great CHRO into what is this going to look like across the company? And we wound up and we had a brace for it. We wound up losing close to 25% of the people through that first 18 months. And it started with engineering because they felt it first because we were asking them to develop in a very different way, but ultimately all the way down to the Salesforce. There’s a different set of skills as you got to experience with that type of company. But because we took a five-year horizon on that plan, we had time to really think through to pace the change. And again, we made so many mistakes and there are so many things that we do differently, but the one thing that we didn’t waiver from was if we want to serve our customers and we want to really help build a lasting company, we have to get through this transition and there is no reversing.
And once we got to the 50% mark of the contracts, that helped.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, so I remember Sean in a conversation with his team when there was resistance, he basically just said, get on board or get out. I mean there was a it’s time to agree or a tri, right? I mean did you have those moments?

Doug Merritt:
We did, but they happen at different times through the org because we still, so I think about sales was one of the last that really had that call to action because they could still sell the on-prem product and by the time I left, we were still selling it. It just kept reducing its percentage of the quarterly composition. So they had time to wrap their heads around it. And we had, again, reasonable attrition for a multitude of reasons. I think this was one of the core reasons is it was a very different way of selling and a different way of getting compensation and compensated, et cetera. Engineering was the first

Speaker 3:
Because

Doug Merritt:
We were asking them to develop in a completely different way and a lot like we’re doing aviatrix, we took the decision that we’re going to have a single line of code and then abstract different elements of it for the cloud so that we could have an on-prem version that was current and have a cloud version, but they had a very different feeling look and feel and a whole host of characteristics than they were different.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Engineering was first and then consulting, like the implementation consultants because they kind of saw the writing on the wall that they will go away.

Doug Merritt:
They could,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Well they did.

Doug Merritt:
They wound up not really going away for us, but what they did change a lot because so much

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Of now they’re what adoption consultants or

Doug Merritt:
It was a lot. We went from a deep technical presence within an account. How do you actually even implement the correspond platform and what are you doing with all the very unique command line driven configurations and to much more what is the set of use cases you’re trying to implement and what are the implementation structures more from a day in the life? How do you want the feel of the app to be structured and how do you want to integrate with other components? But yeah, the technical swap out was pretty dramatic because you no longer had to be deep in the speeds and the feeds of the innards of the database.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And that reminds me of the other big transformation is you go from speaking the language of the product to the language of the customer, right? I mean you had to zoom out and now talk about, I mean it was a very different language and a different actual customer and that requires a whole different skillset. I mean some people were not comfortable with. So there’s the upskilling, let’s go back to your passion for learning. How do you figure out who’s going to get upskilled, who’s going to get moved out? Who’s going to, and how do you upskill as you’re doing two things at once? What was that journey like? Was that, I mean,

Doug Merritt:
If I just key on your last piece, which is I was on a call literally before this with a exec, one of our partners who said, because Aviatrix has been customer self-managed and now we’ve got our platform as a service version that we just announced at reinvent a few weeks ago. She said, did you do it yourself and would you have wanted a partner to do it for you? And I said, I would never want a partner to do this for me because I need beginning with the engineering team, but all the way through I need our company to walk a mile in the customer shoes. The true benefit for me of SaaS or all of its iterations is you don’t create something and throw of the wall and then kind of theorize what the CIO and his or her staff might be dealing with. You own it. You live it every single day. You’re an end user. So every aspect, now you’ve got to own the cost of implementation, what resources it utilizes, how does the UI work, how quickly is it up and running, how do you do a patch? It radically transforms your thinking. So that is the foundation and what I love about it is so customer centric, you are on
In the shoes of the customer and then for the employee base, I’ve found that it’s really difficult to forecast who’s going to react, what we did set up. It’s

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Been hard to assess who’s currently reacting that way because information like that doesn’t trickle up, right?

Doug Merritt:
No, no, it’s definitely bottoms up and you’ve got to experience it and I was constantly surprised from an exec or mid-level manager or an individual contributor I knew it’s like, oh yeah, they’re not going to make this cut at all. They don’t get it. And some of them resisted for a while. Change is hard for humans. But then they started experiencing this like, oh my god, this is unbelievable. And they just dove in and started taking classes on the side and we had a bunch of classes and we wound up taking a key off of Microsoft and Satya and implementing Carol Dweck’s book on growth mindset as part of our onboarding. And I had my leadership principles that try to emphasize that, but some people really gravitated and other people that I thought were really learning oriented, just self-selected out. And
So it’s hard to determine. I think you can create the signals, the mechanisms within a company on who’s really going back to our daily standups, who’s really leaning in and who’s not, and you can see if you’ve got enough touch points and you really incentivize your first line, second line managers on going deep with their teams and doing their job, which is not to be the expert that they used to do, but to actually be a people manager, to actually be a mentor, to be someone that helps with learning and development. Then you can help ’em with the signals and the confidence that someone is not going to make the transition and it’s okay. It’s not going back to their own failures, it’s not bad. We can hug and thank each other for the time together and just agree that this is not a fun environment for you. You’re ready for something else. You’re not embracing it, but you’ve got to make that call. And the hardest part that I’ve had in my career is how do you get better at making those judgements quicker versus being conflict avoidant or being too empathetic and waiting too long and trying to find that line is so hard. Also,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Joe Terry is actually remarkably good at that. I don’t know how he does it, but I mean the other day I was on LinkedIn, someone that he let go wrote this love letter to Joe three months after he was let go, and it was remarkable because I mean, it’s really just Joe having a conversation and he is done this multiple times since I’ve been here where he says, it doesn’t seem like you really love what you’re doing right now. Is that right? What do you really want to do? How can we help you get there? It looks like this isn’t really a fit anymore. Let me help you. And people leave with smiles on their faces because they’ve been seen and it’s not some bizarre loyalty pretend dynamic where wait a minute, it’s not okay for me to say I don’t like it here or for you to say that you don’t think I’m happy here. It’s just authenticity. It’s transparency that I think is often missing.

Doug Merritt:
I agree. I agree. It’s something that I really want Aviatrix to become expert at because I believe it in my soul. Again, if we’re all here for learning and growth, this might not be a learning moment. You chose it at one point in time and as you go through it, you get to the point it’s like, this isn’t the right role. I thought I really want to be in engineering and I find I don’t like engineering. Awesome. There’s nothing wrong with that. Thank you. We’ll help you recognize that. How do we help you? Is there something internally? Is there something externally? But if you go back to there are no failures, it’s our duty to help people get more and more and to get more and more comfortable with themselves to try and breed positive self-love. Not the egotistical, but I’m a good person. I’m here for a reason.
I’m okay being perfectly imperfect. And if you can get there, then it really is just what I’ve really found through the years is if you have that honest conversation 99 out of a hundred times, you go back two or three years later and they will thank you. It’s like, you know what? Even if I didn’t agree with it at the time you saw it, you were right. I wasn’t at the right company or I wasn’t in the right role or I wasn’t at the right level and I’m so glad you did that. I do have the one out of 100. It’s like they’re still bitter and upset and they felt like it wasn’t their choice, but I’ll take those odds anytime.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, I mean, what you’re describing, I’ve never used this language for it, but it’s something I’ve always felt in my bones that there’s corporations, they’re really a construct of our imagination if you think about it, right? In reality don’t really exist, and yet they are the things that we clock into and clock out of and get our paycheck from. So in another lens of the world, they do exist. And what I do for my own career, and it makes me feel sane because I can look at corporations as this entity that is to be judged, but when I look at it differently, what I realize is, okay, I got to wake up and do something all day. I might as well use this sandbox as a playground for experimenting with my own personal growth and learnings and interactions and humanity. This is where I’m going to do it all day long instead of over here.
And I kind of pick the sandbox I want to be in as opposed to being so identified and attached to the idea that I’m the chief strategy officer at Culture Partners, which is owned by HKW. It’s like, who cares about all that? What I really care about is what’s going on with me and Joe today, and when we have an interaction, are we mad at each other? Is he mad at me? That kind of thing is much more interesting to me. And then to learn and to talk about stuff becomes this whole other lens for me that I still haven’t quite figured it out. Maybe that’s a third dimension.

Doug Merritt:
I couldn’t agree more. Yuval Hari does a really good job in many of his books, but Sapiens on these countries, companies, they’re all figments of our imagination, but they help us as a species. We wouldn’t. When you realize that you’re abroad and you’re American and you see another American, there’s an affinity and you actually get along with each other. So they’re good and they’re bad, but they’re fake. I experienced that the first time when I went to this company, SAP, it’s the biggest tech employer in southern Germany. And so if you come in, you wind up staying there usually for a really long time. And Silicon Valley, you typically do 2, 3, 4, 5 years at a company and then go to the next company, usually with the same group of people. If you’re a good networker and you do good jobs, you get dragged along. And I came in at a pretty senior level and the SAP people are like, man, I don’t get you at all.
Why do you guys, one, you’re with Oracle and they suck. They’re the worst company ever, and SAP is so much better, and why do you guys keep popping? It’s like, no, you don’t get it. I work for Silicon Valley, Inc. You work for SAP Inc, which is like Silicon Valley, Inc. It’s the only game in Heidelberg and Waldorf. But I really believe that going back to Aviatrix, we are intersected for a point in time. There’s no way I’m going to be here. I don’t believe until I die, unless something tragic happens I’m not expecting. I don’t expect you to be here till you die. So we’re here together at the moment. How do we help each other the best? My obligation is help you learn and progress as much as possible to the best work you can do because you’re going to go somewhere else, and I just want our time together to be as fruitful for you as humanly possible.
I want you to look back and say, that was awesome. I learned a ton. I met great folks, but we just can’t take this ownership orientation because one, it’s fake. Totally. And it goes against what’s really happening in the world, which is we’re all, I love the individual accountability. We’re all accountable for our own lives and our own brands and own that. And especially in 2025, geez, there’s so many tools to be, as you said, I control the effort. God controls the outcome. The one thing I can’t manufacture is your will, your will and excitement. But I can help with a lot. I can help create the right environment, but man, you got to show up with the world.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, totally. And it’s interesting. I was listening to Joe Rogan this weekend, and he’s made this great line, which was, people suck at power, and I turned that into a newsletter. It’ll come out tomorrow or the next day, which is, yeah. I think sometimes the more powerful you become in your imaginary system, whether it’s the CEO or board or investor or whatever politician, religious figure, it’s everywhere. You end up wanting to identify with the power because it boosts your ego. The more power you have, the more important you are, and that self-importance builds and it feels good, and it’s the short term neuron firing, winning feeling. So you’re like, yeah, this is really important. And so I think it’s harder. I just find this, it’s a lot easier to have this conversation with someone who has no power, who’s like, yeah, totally. It’s all make believe as opposed to a CEO, which is why this conversation is refreshing where you have the power, but you’re also aware of perspective of what’s really going on and how we can all grow together, which I really appreciate. So Splunk ended you retire, or was it ever really a retirement? Did you change your mind about retirement?

Doug Merritt:
I told myself as retirement. I’m not sure if I ever believed it, but it was going back to, it’s great to have these philosophies, but two months after my exit from Splunk, when all the emails stopped and I wasn’t speaking in front of large groups and there was a dislocation of, oh, wow, I actually like that. I was attached to that. So there was a whole process, but one of the things I found is I had no idea how fried I was. My cortisol levels were completely out of whack. My health checks had X triathlete and very, very disciplined about things, and my blood work wasn’t good. And it’s just like I actually love my family and I’ve been fortunate. I’ve done pretty well. Why don’t I just focus on being a great dad and a great husband and get back, focus on my health and I’ll advise and I’ll help out and this will be great.
And a year and a half in I’ve realized it’s, it doesn’t work for me. I wish it did sometimes, but I love being part of a team. I love being in the mix. There’s something different when you’re committed to a mission. And for me, that mission still is, I’ve got to eventually figure out what it’s going to be outside of a work or corporate structure, but it still is being on the battlefield with your engineers, with your sales reps, with your marketing team, with your HR team, just every single day trying to serve the employees, serve the customers. I really missed, I call that I missed my tribe. I had my friends and my family, but it’s different than the eight or 10 or 12 hours that you get when you’re inside of something a little bit more purposeful.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. Well, I think we as humans want to be useful. Being useful feels good. And so when we’re feeling useless, it doesn’t feel good. Right. Okay. So when you get to the CEO level, does industry experience matter nearly as much as it seems like it should or does it not? Is it really just about how you manage people and lead a team or, because I was listening to the podcast, your aviatrix podcast that you were a guest on the first time and you guys were nerding out about the tech and the guy said, which surprised me towards the end like, oh, well, you must have been really confused. You didn’t have network experience. It must’ve been so hard. And I was thinking, no, I don’t think it would’ve been that hard for him because I mean, he’s been a tech guy his entire life network is just another thing. It’s just another version of working on this in this world. Was it hard or is it really not that hard when you get to the CEO level?

Doug Merritt:
I think at the 10,000 foot level, it really is about being an excellent people manager, people mentor, leader. I think it translates across industries as Ted Lasso tried to show us one of my favorite shows ever.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
I know I heard in that episode that you were a super fan of Ted Lasso.

Doug Merritt:
Yeah, need to meet Jason at some point in time. But I do think industry experience matters. I took your perspective, which is I’ve been in tech my whole life ever since I graduated from college and I got my first job at Accenture. I played in very different levels of the stack. And I have barely been in networking, but I’ve been at the operating system level. I’ve been at the core development tools level and systems management level. I be at the apps level, and you have to have an awareness of how the rest of the technology stack works and what data centers look like, and you don’t have to. I loved it. And so I went deep on it. So there was a ramp, and for six months I was definitely voraciously reading and podcasting and YouTubing on going back and beginning to get the beginning of my CCIE Cisco courses.
Really, really where we come from. And so I think it makes sense to learn, but if you took me out of tech and planted me in the movie industry or planted me in consumer food and beverage or I think it’d be hard. I mean a really good leader could probably make it. It depends how loaded the situation is. But I think that there’s a lot of benefit I’ve looked at as there’s three legs of the stool as far as how dangerous is the change. Have you done the role before? Do you actually understand the industry? And then what was my third leg? I can’t believe I’m blanking

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
On that. I thought you just said three.

Doug Merritt:
Yeah.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
How dangerous is it?

Doug Merritt:
Well, if you change more than one of the legs can’t, I’m going way back in time. If you

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Change more, how dangerous is it? Is the three legs I got it.

Doug Merritt:
Yeah. Is the risk that you have, maybe the third one was buying center. That was like a 30-year-old framework. So if you’ve done the CEO role before and you’ve done it in tech and it’s going to be networking, you can probably survive. If you’ve done the CEO role before and you’ve never been in an industry and it’s a brand new, you’ve got the CEO capability but not the rest of the surrounding capability, you have a chance. But I see what you’re saying, stack against you.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
There’s the industry, there’s the role, and then there’s

Doug Merritt:
My mythical third thing that I’ll figure out,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Right? Well, we won’t use this clip for social media because it’s like, oh, there’s a third one, whatever. Look it up.

Doug Merritt:
I’m not even sure if I’ve ever talked about it, but I had that framework as I was because I went from coding to sales to back to engineering, to marketing to ProServe, and I changed aspects of the industry. And I always try to figure out, can I actually do this or not?

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And

Doug Merritt:
So it was firm in my mind 25 years ago,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Do you have imposter syndrome today? Do you have imposter syndrome? Sometimes,

Doug Merritt:
Sometimes

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Not that much.

Doug Merritt:
I think a lot less now it goes back to maybe learning is all that matters is one of those survival instincts.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah,

Doug Merritt:
I’m an amazing learner. I love learning and I think I’ve earned a lot of experience now by doing multiple different roles. But I remember distinctly from my entire tenure at SAP wondering every day if my badge is going to work or not.

Speaker 3:
So

Doug Merritt:
That was extreme imposter imposter syndrome. I wasn’t German, I didn’t come up through the engineering ranks. It was a very tight culture there and I was an outsider. And German is, Germany is a very craftsman orientation, which is I think an awesome noble thing. We should have more vocational school here, but I didn’t come up through that guild. So it’s like, what am I doing here? I’m a really good people manager. I understand Silicon Valley. I know I added in value, but I think it cut me off at any point in time. And luckily my badge always worked, but I’ve had periods of imposter syndrome.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So let me take you back to the thing that I’ve been wrestling with for years, which is this, I believe your philosophy of leadership that if we can focus on the learnings and just focus on the effort, the daily effort that I put in, how can I be of use? How can I be committed to the mission? How can I be expansive in my thinking so that I can take risks and fail and learn and continue and I let God be responsible for the outcome? I believe that would create worry-free workplaces. If we really lived and breathed that way of thinking where people would be way less stressed, your cortisol levels as the CEO would go down, people would feel less burnout because we would all know we’re committed to the mission and the work and the outcome is going to be what it is. I mean, how do you create a business case for that though? Because in a public company with those, I mean we talked about this a little bit, but what is the argument to the investors that this is the right way to be? Because the investors I talk to say, but are you going to get to the EBITDA number or not? They’re very outcome focused.

Doug Merritt:
They, they’re So, one, I picked a private company on purpose, right? Because public was an option I really, really wanted. I came back to be part of Find My Tribe and to really work on this, how do you create an unveiled employee experience? And part of that in my mind was you’ve got to release the outcome. And there’s the two aspects to it. You control the effort, but that controlling the effort means you also control the rate of learning every day. If you just go back to sports junkies always do sports metaphors. Steph Curry and LeBron James and the great basketball players still do dribbling drills every day, footwork drills every day, free throw drills every day. But they don’t just do them. They’ve got people observing them and they still are making micro fine tunings. And it’s an engaged learning experience. So I don’t just want you to show up.
I want you to show up and learn and iterate and improve, which then changes relationship to first line manager. As a first line manager, your job is to be that dribbling coach. You better be a pretty darn good dribbling because you’re going to be really helping that person make sure that they’re working on all their skills so that they can be as effective. They need to be in that discipline. But the experimentation that I want to drive is if you have this learning culture and you really create it systemically across the company, there is incremental improvement every day and you can measure that improvement. And would that be enough as we begin to tie that daily activity and criminal improvement to the end of a week, outcome to the end month outcome, the end of a quarter outcome, how much of a tie is there and how does that relate to employee satisfaction, employee confidence, turnover rates, career advancement, overall skilled delivery within any mastery within a domain?
And I’m not sure how it ends. I mean, what I’ve seen in corporate America is I went back and listened to your interview with the CEO of Ikea, which I’ve been fascinating with. The way Europeans run companies for since my SAP days is that you can get short-term results for sure, the way that we do it in America, but the longevity rate of Fortune 500 companies is abysmal, and it is really different than Europe. You’ve got these companies have been around for 80, a hundred, 20, 140 years and they keep reinventing themselves. There still are failures in Europe as well, and they’ve got their own problems there, but there’s a different focus. There’s more long-term there. And this is really a long-term thinking. It’s very contrarian. I’ve viewed myself as a counterbalance in life often. I almost always take the opposing perspective, and this is a counterbalance orientation, which was Splunk also, why would you ever want to transform a company in public markets from one way of living and one way of counting things to another. But I love that that goes back to learning and growth and the hard thing about hard things. But I really wanted to code this of can you help people take a longer term view, but in a way that doesn’t totally freak them out in the short term, that they eventually abandon everything and go back to the thing that works, which ultimately creates a deflationary outcome at some point in time.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
It’s almost like what you’re describing is that in order to take the long-term view, we have to take the micro view the day. So day view and your metaphor with the basketball dribbling was perfect because what it shows me is if we focus on the feedback loop of a team that trusts itself to grow and learn on a day-to-day basis, we can create growth faster, which will ultimately lead to outcomes. But the resistance comes from the ego. Steph Curry has to be willing to get feedback and to be told, you did that wrong,

Speaker 3:
And

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Steph Curry now, but Steph Curry at the beginning of his career needed to be okay with that. Then when you don’t have the validity of the success to bolster your ego. So that’s the impossible part. How do you overcome the ego? Because as enlightened as I like to pretend I am, I hate getting feedback. I mean, it makes me feel like I failed. I am not living the thing that we were talking about. I’m very sensitive. So lots of people are sensitive though. So how do you overcome the ego of, well, that makes me feel bad. I don’t know that you have my best interest at heart.

Doug Merritt:
Let’s experiment on this together and see, I’m partnering with some folks to try and help on this that we can go into a different type point in time. But it really is, I think there’s a hiring orientation of how do you filter for grittiness and tenacity and learning orientation and excitement about learning and getting feedback. But then I think you’ve got to create a system, right? It’s got to be that if without the feedback, the whole thing doesn’t work. And that’s what I saw as Splunk went to the cloud is, wow, there’s so much data. Why aren’t we going back every day, every week and looking at the data and seeing what did we get and what didn’t we get? And how do we learn? How do we tune? And I think with N ai, the data is just going to get rid. Again, people don’t know what to do with it.
Gen I will help because they will know what to do with it. But we have so much information available if we’re willing to actually use it. But you need the people that are excited and willing to participate in the system. But through our lives, through college or high school, through any sports team, you’re forced to get feedback. You take practice quizzes, you take exams, you go to practice every single single day, and there’s game tape and practice tape, and you have nightly sessions of analyzing it. And then why when we get to the workplace, is it all throughout the window? It’s like, oh, you’ll figure it out. You don’t need that anymore.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Well, it’s funny because our culture consulting system involves a ton of feedback. And I mean most of the work we do is reminding people and encouraging more feedback, give and take because there’s so much resistance to it. And even in our company, we could do it more than we do because it’s just a natural, there’s also these dynamics, right? The politics of work is, well, wait a minute, are you just trying to make me look bad? Do you just not buy into what I’m doing? Because you have a different worldview and you’re in that group, and that group blames us for this and the corporate politics. So it’s interesting. Where it kind of comes back to is you do need trust. You need the kumbaya circle

Speaker 3:
And

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Then people to get together for team building so that they look each other in the eye and say, okay, actually you’re a good dude. We had a drink last night and you told me about your wife, and now I feel like you’re more of a human rather than a sales rep, the title that you hold. So maybe it is too, after all,

Doug Merritt:
And you need a ton of work clarity, because what you really should be giving feedback on is, again, I’m a business development rep and my job is outbound prospecting and qualification. What does that look like? So what are the true details of the job? And then what is expected of you on a daily basis? And then feedback on what makes a good set of interactions, what makes a good prompt, what makes a good workflow? We going back to, you need that dribbling coach. You need the first line, the manager of those teams to buy into crafting that org clarity and the daily discipline of activities. And then again, we can augment that with third party consultants and helpers for folks because it’s a journey. But if you can disassociate, it’s not an opinion. It’s legitimate feedback. Like we’re both on the gong call and our recommendation that gong everyone’s recommendation is you might’ve taken this turn. Do you agree that that could work? Go try that. And again, we could be wrong, but why don’t you try that different approach and see if

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
You get better results? But I think if we were able to take that discipline approach and disassociate the interpretation, which it comes with a lot of the politics to the actual activity. There is some proof that dribbling a certain way and a certain rate and hand speed exchange is effective. Again, there’s a perfect translation from the sports to work, but I think we can do better translation. Yeah. Well, and there’s not only the politics of it that creates resistance, but also people’s personal backgrounds.

Speaker 3:
If you

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Grew up with a dad that was always criticizing you, you’re probably not going to like feedback as much as someone who had a super uplifting household. And that’s the invisible part of it

Speaker 3:
That

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
We never see. We have seen studies this year that people who have depression and anxiety are much more likely to receive feedback poorly than people who don’t. And so what we see without knowing the diagnosis, knowing people’s personal lives, is we see someone react poorly and we think how unprofessional and there isn’t the understanding and the empathy, which there can’t be because it is like a chicken and the egg. I’ve been frustrated with the HR world saying, bring your authentic selves to work. Tell us everything about you. Be super vulnerable. But we haven’t equipped the leaders to receive that information with equanimity. Right. Then people judge, well, wait a minute, you’ve got a problem. Well then I see you as different. Right. And so the unconscious bias can perpetuate the differences and anyway, we are people doing work. Yes, we’re people. We’re people doing work and about the effort, not the outcome. I think that’s great. You’re like the first CEO I’ve talked to other than Joe Terry, who actually feels like they live and breathe

Doug Merritt:
This.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Do you come across others?

Doug Merritt:
No, I don’t. I don’t. Okay.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Well, that’s probably why you love Joe Terry or Joe Terry loves you because it’s rare to come across that maybe Dan Streetman too, to, I don’t know. Jan is very outcome oriented, but he has integrity, right?

Doug Merritt:
It’s that fine line of I’m super hard on myself. I’m very competitive. I expect a lot from myself, and that translates to the people. I’ve got very strong ambitions for this company. I’m just trying to translate that to we’re going to get there using this approach through

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
The backdoor. It’s a backdoor approach to results rather than just drive, drive, drive, which turns everyone off and exhausts the person driving those results.

Doug Merritt:
That was my biggest lesson at Splunk. One, one of my biggest lessons is we had such ambitious goals and we focus on the outcome way too much. Again in the public market’s, a lot going on there, but we burnt a lot of people out. And again, it was super successful. It was my favorite eight years of my career, and I’m proud of what the company did. But looking back, it’s like we may have gotten the same results if we took a different approach and even had a better culture. I was proud of the culture there, but I think there are ways we could have enhanced. So get to run the experiment again, see what happens.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Let’s see what happens. Well, thank you so much for chatting with us. I have one last question, which is what is something that you don’t get asked about very often that you wish you were asked more often in these types of interviews?

Doug Merritt:
I thought a lot about that, and I did not. It was so dependent upon how the conversation went and you covered, you went deep on my passion areas. My standard answer is I wish that people asked a bit more. How do I see the world of work and do I think that there’s a different way to drive effective capitalist outcomes and still honor and grow people? And why do I think that? And because that’s what I don’t find that often. There’s a lot of lip service to my people are my most important asset. What? CEO does not say that. And then in reality, you look at the company and the first sign of anything, they start chopping their people. But that is what is the difference between someone that is trying to live that and someone that is giving a good interview.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, totally. I mean, it’s almost so obvious to me when it’s one versus the other. I mean, everyone says people first, right? And I think HR in particular, HR thought leaders, HR experts, hr, they really lean into that. But they go so hard that they forget about the business necessity of creating outcomes. And so then it’s all soft and then they lose all credibility. So then the CEOs that could be listening to them aren’t because it’s like, well, you’re not getting that. We have to get both, right? It can’t just be one or the other. How did you come, I’m going to ask one last question, even though I never do. How did you come to this philosophy? Where does this come from in you?

Doug Merritt:
I had a unusual childhood. We moved sometimes twice one year and often every year until high school when I stayed in mini revolt. And my mom actually listened and we stayed for all four years, which is great, but a lot of my lessons from my youth were the opposite of what I’m talking about. If you don’t like it, just leave and change it. If you don’t like the outcome, lie about it or cover it. Up and through the years, I’ve done a ton of work, a lot of therapy bills on what does integrity mean to me and why am I really here on this planet and what do I really value and care about? And it is God and people and connections and helping others. And the more that I got the opportunity to lead people, the more that began to really sink in with me.
And I’m very critical and every engagement, and I was super self-critical as Splunk, why couldn’t I do better? Which I think I ultimately came back was you don’t get to go deep when you’re an advisor or a board member or investor. You’re not supposed to. I don’t think you should. You can only go deep if you’re on the field with a team and I’m not done. I’m really fascinated by how do we create a empowering and liberating and learning oriented environment with high accountability? If you’re not pulling your weight, you’re not here. I refuse to call you family. You’re a teammate. You’re a teammate, and you’ve got to show up with your will, and you’ve got to be learning oriented. And if you’re not, again, we’ll hug and I’ll help direct you somewhere else, but you’re not going to be on the team. So there’s that interesting duality of high accountability, but try to do it differently.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
But I don’t think it’s a duality because I think there’s nothing more spiritually enlightened than taking accountability to make a personal choice to focus on what you can control. That is ultimate effort focus. It’s like instead of blaming and the pointing fingers, it’s I’m going to take responsibility for my entity here and I’m going to do something and I’m going to put in an effort and be useful. So that also

Doug Merritt:
Answers. I

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Love that. That’s also why you said there’s no suffering because it is the suffering that led you to the insight to where you are now. Right. And it’s without the suffering, you probably would be another tech, bro.

Doug Merritt:
Yes. No, you’re right. Again, I just dunno how you learn without it.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. Well, it’s funny. I just signed up to volunteer for this hospice program, and I was doing the orientation. Everyone in the room lost someone, every single person, and it’s in that suffering that they said, well, how can I be of service to someone who’s going through something painful? And here we are. It’s actually the grief and the suffering was the superpower that got people to show up. So I totally get it. You just made 10 million things in my brain click that I’ve been trying to make click for about two and a half years. So this has been one of my favorite interviews. Thank you so much for coming and for being who you are.

Doug Merritt:
Well, thank you so much for having me. I’m curious how you selected me, but we’ll talk about that some other time.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Okay. I certainly will let you know.

Doug Merritt:
It’d be great to continue our conversation outside this.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, let’s stay in touch. Absolutely. Awesome. This has been so great. Thank you, Doug.