Leading in a time of chaos

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Ready to explore the extraordinary world of tech. Welcome to the XTech podcast where we connect you with the sharpest minds and leading voices in the global tech community. Join us as we cut through the complexity to give you a clear picture of the ideas, innovations, and insight that are shaping our future.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Hello and welcome to XTech podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Forster MBE. I’m a tech portfolio consultant and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion, and innovation in the tech industry. I’m delighted to be working with Fox Agency as the host of the XTech podcast and as a curator for the XTech community. Today I’m really pleased to be joined by Alexei Miller, the managing director of DataArt. Hi Alexei.

Alexei Miller:
Hello Debbie, good morning.

Debbie Forster MBE:
As I think I’ve mentioned to you, we’d love to get to know you as a human before we talk to you more as a techie. And I love hearing about the journey about how people got into tech some people born with it, others wake up and find themselves there. What about you? How did you get into tech?

Alexei Miller:
Neither born nor found myself very quickly, took a while for sure. I think my path to tech can be best described as failed mathematician, and although mathematics and tech are very close to each other, they’re actually quite different in terms of career path that you could choose. So in my case, mathematics growing up were easy or I thought they were easy, the correct statement would be easy mathematics were easy. And then that was enough to get myself into a fairly good math school, arguably one of the best in Russia where I was growing up and there I discovered that there’s actually difficult mathematics and that one was not easy. And so I was very good with easy stuff, I decided the less good would the more complicated stuff. And I was surrounded by people who were really, really, really good with all kinds of stuff.

And I held my own, I stumbled along for about four years in a five-year math major programme. And in my fourth year I came to a second revelation, which I frankly should have come too much sooner, which was there’s no money in mathematics or at least not in fundamental math or academic math that I was sort of on a gliding course to go to. And so in the fourth year of university, I was starting to go a little crazy and antsy I certainly didn’t want to be a weight over my parents necks financially and I said, well, it seems like computers are cool and people seem to be making money using computers, so why don’t I do that? I switched into computer science major, which wasn’t very easy because I needed to catch up with a few years worth of studying.

But in my fifth year I finished my university with a computer science major and in that fifth year I met somehow through personal acquaintances, a bunch of guys their best described as a bunch of guys who were looking to do something, no strategy, no significant purpose as far as I could tell at the time who were looking for a programmer. And I foolishly said, “Oh, I’m a programmer.” Simply because I was just starting to study mathematics and then switch to computer science. So I was a pretty bad computer scientist, definitely very bad programmer, but I liked the guys and they seem to like me and we started DataArt and the rest is sort of history. So, I was mildly self-conscious when you said what I was before I was a techie arguably, I never became a techie. I know enough about technology to pass an impression, but I am certainly surrounded by well over 5,000 much better techies in my own company than I am.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Wow. And that’s always the case, isn’t it? To be a truly great leader, you want to surround yourself with people who do things better, faster, more efficiently than you do. And in tech it’s grown to expand just about everything now I think people will be hard pressed to find many professions that you wouldn’t argue has some link into tech in that respect, doesn’t it?

Alexei Miller:
For sure. And I think one of the things that I really appreciated about technology software development, software technology in particular is that it’s everywhere and it provided at the time, and it continues to provide seemingly endless opportunities. This sort of ties in my mind to the early days of DataArt, the company we together started and continue to work in, in that those first years were not very nice, not very organised, they were full of failure, all kinds of failures. But software as a discipline, the internet that was just getting started back then was always something else to do.

So you failed in one thing this project didn’t really go anywhere. Okay, there’s another one, there’s another idea of how that might lead to money and provide some living for us. So it’s almost infinitely flexible in mathematics terms we call it fractal, which is like a little portal and you open and there’s a whole world out there and you open one of the doors in that world and there’s another world that looks just like the bigger one, so software world is like that in many respects. And so I appreciate not the beauty of technology itself, I care about it, but probably not as much as someone in my profession should. But I do care and I’m grateful for this world of software, world of software technology, the opportunities that it provides to not just myself but millions of people.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I do think when we look across great products, great companies, great services around tech you need both of those sides, you do need some people who are just enamoured with the beauty of tech in and of itself. But that’s risky unless you have somebody, what they’re in love with is what tech can do, the utilitarian view, those are great partnerships if you can find ways of blending those. Which it sounds like you did at DataArt, so not everyone will have come across DataArt before, can you give me your quick pitch? What does DataArt do?

Alexei Miller:
Thank you for that opportunity. DataArt helps clients, organisations of all kinds create custom software systems, modernise their old technology with the purpose of making their businesses better. We are a service to those whose processes or ambitions are unique enough to require custom software tech. And we do it well, we do it at scale, we’ve been doing this for 25 plus years and so we’re able to tackle fairly significant projects for large and medium-sized organisations that depend on it for their competitive advantage, for their operational efficiency and so forth. So that’s our business, 100% service work for hire, if you’ll outsourcing is another term that is used to describe our business. That’s us.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And it sounds like, I think the old days, and I think we’re sometimes still enamoured by those old terms that everything was start-up, everything was serial entrepreneurs, you are a company of 25 years experience and you’re not a tiny start-up anymore. I noticed with interest that you described yourself not necessarily as a founder or an entrepreneur, but as a company builder. Now, for you, what is the significance of that and what that means for DataArt?

Alexei Miller:
Oh, it’s potentially a large topic. Where do we start? Look, I think in the modern western capitalist business world, broadly speaking, the term manager or leader have acquired over time this very thick layer of glamour that is not always well earned. I think this image that we often have of executives, managers, etc, as they know everything, they control everything, they tell everyone what to do. Much of the time it’s not true, and even when it is true, it’s probably not very healthy. And so my philosophy is too fancy of words, but my approach to things is you need to provide some direction, you could call it leadership, but we could use more modest terms here. You need to provide support, you need to help people organise, but you largely need to be in the assistant function. Sort of this servant leader I think is the term that is used to this attitude I don’t have a fixed philosophy, I’m not going to say, “Oh, I read this book it opened my eyes in this new age management philosophy.”

I just think that when you operate at some scale, you have to be honest with yourself vast, vast majority of work in your company, is done not only obviously by other people, but also outside of your direct control and sometimes or often knowledge. And so your job as a manager or in this case the builder, is to build a system whether it’s possible where you have the processes, the data, the financial resources, the people in the right places, motivation system, the ideology, even though that’s a loaded term that the system can work, the system knows its purpose, and also individual groups within that system have the freedom to make their own decisions.

So, I don’t know if I’m a builder per se, I’m a lot more comfortable with simpler terms player coach or something like that. I note with interest that in American sports we have coaches in English football for example, you’ve got managers and to me that’s interesting because a manager here in the US is a financial type and the coach is sort of the substance, the playing and all of that. And in the UK, managers who manages the team, but you can’t really manage the team that’s already playing. You can yell from the side-lines, you can huff and puff, you can drive yourself crazy, there’s relatively little you can do. Most of your management work is actually done when you’re not able to manage it’s in preparation for this moment. And it’s sort of similar, my approach to things, it’s preparing myself and the team for when they need to act, which in business is just about all the time.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Fantastic. You must have taken DataArt through a number of transformations, the world was a very different world 27 years ago, much less the company is different. What have you learned in building your company to the size that it is now?

Alexei Miller:
Well, I’ve learned that it almost never turns out the way you think it’ll turn out. And it’s one of the more frustrating aspects of building a business or managing the business as it were, is that you put your energy and resources and investments into one place and sometimes the results come from that place and sometimes they come from somewhere else. A business opportunity might arise in the business area where you haven’t really invested a tonne and the correlation between effort and reward is certainly not zero but it’s certainly not one-in-one it’s not as direct as a lot of people think.

So I learned, I guess, is that we’re fooling ourselves if we think we control the future, we don’t. We prepare ourselves for different options in the future and so flexibility, adaptability, open-mindedness are essential attributes of the business on par, if not more with the obvious essentials such as money, and proper staff, and training, and physical resources and all of that. But those things are hard to describe. Is your organisation flexible? Who knows? It depends on who’s asking and when and what circumstances. So, building a business to prepare for some unknown version of the future is exciting, scary, irritating, all at the same time. And that it’s okay that you don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s sort of personal in terms of my personal growth as a business person is probably one of the more significant, more fundamental learnings.

And then of course there are more operational learnings, it’s much like in the season there are flowers that bloom in the summer and the flowers that bloom in the spring and maybe there are even something that grows in the winter, I don’t know. Similarly, you need different things in your organisation as you grow and change and as the world around you changes as well. You add maturity, you have to think about unpleasant but necessary things like cybersecurity, especially at the day and age we live in. And so there were several stages in our organisational growth and development that we have come through, happy to discuss them, and we’ll continue to have the change.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Well, in thinking about those stages that you came through as a company, could you describe the company’s development as something that came in stages and what were those?

Alexei Miller:
There are probably multiple ways to slice it, but three stages of phases come to mind each with their own challenges and rewards to be honest. Naturally the start-up stage was marked by ultimate freedom and ultimate uncertainty, those things always go hand in hand. As a company we’re always self-funded we never had an external bunch of money financing our operations and therefore directing where we should go. That changed now we have professional and very good private equity investors for which we’re grateful, but for the first 20 plus years we were essentially self-funded and so that inspired certain conservative approach to hiring, investments, etc.

But in the first few years it was very few people, very little money, very few clients, and ultimate freedom, you could say whatever you wanted, you could do whatever you wanted. You could trust your people or you could not trust, there was no system. And there’s a lot of good in that I think in terms of the level of creativity that it inspires in all of us individually, it’s actually a very good phase but it doesn’t scale very well. And so the next stage, the growth and development and hardening of becoming an actual company. And by the way, think at DataArt, the start-up phase lasted probably longer than normal or longer than it should have I think maybe 5, 7, 10 years or something like that. It certainly wasn’t quick we held on for better or worse to some of the wilder aspects of being a start-up when there were already many hundreds of employees working in the company. We sometimes paid the price for it, but that’s for a separate conversation.

And then this next phase is when you develop some processes, you define what it takes to be scalable. You come to grips with the notion you no longer control much of anything, you influence events, but you certainly don’t define how exactly they’ll happen if you employed first hundreds and then thousands of people. You start to be a lot more prudent with organisational controls, legal, HR, finance, compliance, cybersecurity, which is just mentioned all of those necessary things. And you prepare yourself to do big things, we’re in a service business and small project means small dollars, large project means large dollars, it’s very simple. And large projects are complicated there’s a lot of companies out there that can write a $10,000 check, that’s easy, easy for a company, not many individuals maybe. But there’s no company in the world, no matter how large that writes, a $10 million check easily. They always struggle with it, they always expect a lot, they always watch it like hawks and so on.

So there’s this certain level at which you have to operate in order for big check people to trust you with their big checks, and so this is the phase when you get there. And then the third phase, which we are arguably in today, which is state of maturity is both very promising and very dangerous. And this is where I think it’s important not to lose sight, we have many of those things we are able to execute large projects for some of world’s leading corporations we are trusted with a lot of business opportunities. All of that is great and we have a system that can serve them, so that’s the good part of it and it can be run as a fairly profitable business.
The dangerous part of it is complacency. The world around us changes so fast, technology which is our tools, how we do these things changes every nanosecond. So to borrow someone’s smart trace, what got you here won’t get you there and it’s true every single day. And so we can’t say, “Ah, we have arrived, we have all those things.” We’ve got to keep changing and keep being prepared for more change in the future. So I enjoy this current phase we’re in, but I’m very paranoid that if I allow myself to get too relaxed, the party will be over in a blink of an eye.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Because the thing is, like you said, it is more comfortable but you’re now on a very big boat and it is not easy to turn a very big boat. Whereas when you’re small and agile, those changes to technology pivoting and changing are very straightforward, a little racking, but very straightforward. But thinking ahead, it is that idea of really trying to understand what’s the next pivot point and how are we ready for it long before it’s there is crucial at the size of the company where you are now.

Alexei Miller:
Very true and crucial, but also maybe kind of impossible because if you ask me what’s next? What am I preparing for next year? And the honest answer is I don’t know. I am preparing the company and myself for that to be different from today, but I don’t know exactly what is going to be. And so to borrow your big boat analogy, yes, we’re a big boat, but maybe we could be more like a floaty little small boat which are a little bit easier to turn or some other, I’m not a sailor so…

Debbie Forster MBE:
We’ll both get in trouble if we go much further and trouble the sailors on the podcast. So let me take that and then say back to you, if we are working in an environment in which change is constant in terms of technology, what is the advice? What is the sane way forward to prepare for constant change and unknowable change to some degree? What is the secret to success for that?

Alexei Miller:
I don’t know if I know the secret to success, but I think it starts with honesty. And honesty contradicts a little bit with what is I think traditionally seen as part of leadership. As a leader, you’re expected to provide your people with certainty, this is where we’re going, this is how we’re going to get there, this is what’s good that’s going to happen to everyone once we get there. All nice and good, I’m totally for it except 90% of the time those leaders have no idea that it’s actually going to happen. They will have good ideas of where they want to go, or to them or us, but are we sure? Can we be sure?

And so I think the advice, I mean I’m not sure I’m in position to give advice, my learning is that you have to be transparent and honest with people around you about what you know, what you have doubts of, you have to invite them on the journey. You have to say, It’s not you’re following me, I don’t like that position. We together based on the information that available to us are on this journey. Yes, the management, the leadership makes a decision – we’re going there, you’re all invited. You will be making decisions independently of us. We will share responsibility for those decisions. We will not leave you high and dry because you’ve made a mistake. If we align on where we’re going and what together we’ll likely deal with problems together, there will be problems along the way and changes, and twists, and turns, and whatnot. So putting yourself in a position, where doing things together with the company, with the rest of the people in the company, I think is super important. But you can’t fake it, you have to be honest, including about things you’re not sure about.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And it’s interesting because you’re talking about something that I won’t even say comes full circle because it never totally vanishes. But if we look at your three phases, the first one was you trust your people and your people do things, now it’s your people trust you and you’re going with them on a journey. And I think that transparency comes through and yes, you still must have those systems. Yes, you must have your processes, but it comes back to people. And I think it’s interesting and I like hearing different outlooks on what leadership can be. And yes, for some people that visionary come with me to the mountain can work. But I think there’s also huge scope for the pragmatic leader, the transparent leader that is come with me rather than follow me and embracing that uncertainty and making that that is what is certain. But building it back in what we do know, which is people because in the end, people follow people, people work with people, not a system or a process.

Alexei Miller:
I think it also depends a great deal on the type of business you’re in and you’ve got to be honest about the business you’re in. We’re not a business of colonising Mars or changing humanity in the fundamental way and I have great admiration for companies and leaders that do. We’re a service business, we help our clients get better, launch new products, get rid of inefficiency, glean insights into the oceans of data, all of those things that are accomplished with the help of technology. We’re fortunate because it’s a gigantic market and virtually every company out there needs what we do that’s very, very good place to be. But we’ve got to be realistic, we don’t exist with our clients, we don’t tell every client what they should be doing. We understand what they need and we adjust and pick the way that gets them there in the most optimal fashion.

If we allow ourselves for more than a second to run way ahead of our clients, we’re likely to be in trouble. And so you’ve got to stay humble, got to stay realistic in this sense and it’s a great business to be, like I said. But it’s also important to know your place if you will, in a business world. One of the maybe less discussed aspects of being a consulting business, whether that is accountants or software builders like ours or anything really, doctors, or service business, teachers are in the way of service is that we see a lot of clients, patients, students, construction projects, whatever it may be and we aggregate the needs, the wants, the learnings, the constraints, across so many clients and we bring this collective knowledge to the needs of individual clients.

So, much like bees they fly around the fields, they collect little pieces from those flowers and they carry, they pollinate, they bring this pollen from one flower to the other. We collect a lot of knowledge pollen from a lot of clients, and we bring it to the next flower, which is our next client. That’s very powerful. So what I’m saying, we don’t exist with our clients. Not trying to display like, “Oh, we’re so miserable, we are totally servants here.” Not at all, we have a very powerful role in the business society. We should lean into this role of a connector, of a collective learner, of a bee that brings collective pollen to the needs of the next client. But we should organise ourselves to be just that and not necessarily a whole lot more and so that’s how I try to think about our business, our role in this, if you will.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay, and I love that. And I hope that’s something we’ll definitely leave with our listeners to think about what is our role? How are we making the most of our role as cross pollinators? How are our systems, how are our people equipped best to capture all that diverse learning and insights from all of our clients, our customers, our users, to bring into the next piece? Fantastic.

So, we also love to ask all of our guests on the show the horizon, we always have to look at the horizon if we’re talking about tech. What on the horizon in tech is capturing your attention good or bad at the moment?

Alexei Miller:
So, I think that there are several areas of human activity where the seemingly theoretical connects to very, very practical. One area that was exciting particularly for me is healthcare, health technology, health policy and so on. And it was relatively recently, maybe foolishly so I realised how mathematical statistical that field is and in order for policymakers, large organisations, service providers to make positive change in people’s health and well-being it’s really building those systems on the fundamental, scientific, statistical, mathematical underpinning. We’re doing some of that work for our clients at DataArt, but personally I think this will be a field for huge investments from new drug development to psychological and social ways to influence human behaviour, to make healthier choices, to organising our healthcare system so it can be a lot more efficient, a lot less wasteful. I think it’s a hugely interesting, both personally and professionally field.

There are technology developments, obviously, I’m sure a lot of your guests here talk about AI and how that may or may not change society. We could talk about that I think it’s a powerful tool, but it’s not something that I spend a whole lot of time worrying about as how that will change the world. The world will keep changing, AI is a set of tools that will assist it in changing, but the brains of the world such as they are, they lie elsewhere and the needs of the world that lie elsewhere. And so we invest a lot in AI and our clients look at this very, very attentively but there has to be a purpose, and the purpose has to be clear in our business at least to two very important groups of stakeholders.

This is a slight digression from your actual question, but I think it’s an important point to consider when we think about the future is that when thinking about your business and your business future, you can never lose sight of the purpose. And in our business, it’s who pays you, who’s your client, and who uses technology that you put together. We create software systems, very simple as that, if no one’s using them, it’s a failure even if we got paid for it. If people love it, but no one paid me or us for it it’s also a failure because I have a business to run. So those two groups of stakeholders, the payers and the users, hugely, hugely important. And so what they want, how does a particular piece of technology, whether it’s AI or something else, impact their experience with the tech opens new possibilities for them. We must never lose sight of that.

And one of the luxuries of not being a start-up is we can afford to take a somewhat longer view on this. We don’t look at our next investor as the client. They’re an enabler, they’re a funder of our operations, but they’re not the client. They will not be paying me for software produced, they’ll not be using software produced, therefore I don’t create the business for them and a lot of early stage tech companies build their companies to sell it to investor I think it may be necessary, but ultimately somewhat misguided.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And then Alexei, our last question is going back to you more as the human. What is it that you are reading, or watching, or listening to that’s really got you buzzing at the moment?

Alexei Miller:
So interesting question because I’ve always been a political junkie and I think it’s not healthy, it’s not good for me, it’s one of those bad habits that I want to kick. Some people drink and smoke, I read political news and I think it’s equally bad for my health as if I was smoking. So I do it, I don’t enjoy it anymore I’ve enjoyed it for years so I’m trying to kick that habit. And so my next area of interest is what I mentioned a little bit earlier around health wellness, health policy, health technology I just think it has huge, huge implications to how the world will be organised.

So little by little, I start to read… I used to go to the Washington Post, Bloomberg, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, all of which I subscribe to and read, not fully, but regularly and I would gravitate to sections about politics. Now I try to skip that and I go to business, especially healthcare business and then health and wellness, not so much for personal needs but out of my interest on how that will impact society. So, hopefully in the near future I’ll find some books and podcasts and next time we speak, brag about some of the podcasts I’m listening on this subject, not quite yet. I can tell you a bunch of articles and podcasts I listen to about politics, but I really want to stop so I’ll not talk about this.

Debbie Forster MBE:
That’s making the addict go back to the scene. Yeah, we’re trying to help you kick the habits, so we won’t look at that.

Alexei Miller:
Yeah, exactly.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Alexei, thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed having you here on the show today. I appreciate you taking the time.

Alexei Miller:
Thank you so much, Debbie.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And thank you so much for joining me on this episode of XTech. We’d love to receive your comments and thoughts on what you’ve heard, and you can share them with us at fox.agency/XTech.

Thank you for listening. If you’re a tech innovator and would like to appear as a guest on the show, email us now at [email protected]. And finally, thank you to the team of experts at Fox Agency who make this podcast happen. I’m Debbie Forster, and you’ve been listening to the XTech podcast.

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