Ep. 238 - Tom Bradbury, Author of The Culture Project: 30 Days to Reboot Your Organization on Aligning Culture with Technology Decisions

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tom Bradbury, author of The Culture Project: 30 Days to Reboot Your Organization. Tom and I talk about the changing role of technology in the workplace and how companies can better deliver value by aligning culture with technology decisions.

Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Tom Bradbury, Author of The Culture Project

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation.  I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Tom Bradbury. He is author of a new book called The Culture Project: 30 Days to Reboot Your Organization. Welcome Tom. 

Tom Bradbury: Hi Brian. Thanks for having me today.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on board. Our friends at Sense and Respond, Josh and gang, connected us about your new book that's coming out. You're a two-time founder, a technology advisor, author of this new book. 

You've spent about 20 years of your career focused on workplace technology assessments and how do people use that.  What have you seen in the last 20 years in workplace technology and how did you decide to write a book about culture? 

Tom Bradbury: Great question. Thank you. So, Brian, for a big chunk of my career, 18-19 years, I owned a business, Labrador technology, before selling it to a great competitor in that space. But what we did was help design and manage technology as part of workplace transformation projects. Mostly connected to real estate transactions.  i.e., A lease comes up, we're building out a new workplace and we would design all the connectivity and all the AV in the boardroom tech for these companies to leverage in their new spaces.

And for doing that for some of the biggest global brands out there, we ran into a lot of different scenarios and a lot of different approaches. But one thing was for sure, that the design and construction process had such a gravitational pull from a budget perspective, and a resourcing perspective, that the decisions around investing in technology weren't as strategic as they should be or could be. Right. 

So, I would see and hear these discussions about Pepsi, Unilever, BNP Paribas, Alliance Bernstein, Bridgewater Associates, where they were going and how they wanted to represent themselves with this new workplace. But some of the technology discussions or that thread of the project didn't always match the same level of strategy as some of those other conversations.

So the final handful of years of me owning Labrador Technology, what I did was create a methodology to go in and understand an end-user's reality of what it's like to use technology at whatever organization they work for. 

And I would overlay that with either a direct experience interviewing executives on where they were taking their business, right, or some material that was released in a board meeting or what was presented at the start of the mission of a new workplace. And I'd get a sense for where the executives were trying to go and what they were trying to accomplish. 

And then I would talk to it and in some cases, HR, to get their perspective on technology and its importance within a business. And I'd lay those perspectives over each other. IT, HR, employee experience, and executive senior leadership's perspective on where they were going. And there was a hundred percent of the time, there was always a mismatch in each one of those realities and what they were seeing. 

So, I really started to set out and say, what's driving how people invest and how they enable internally technology. And it connected. And I mentioned HR, really, what I started to focus in on was the use of technology by talent, by the people in any organization. And seeing the influences of culture impact how they made tech investments, and how they were rolling them out and giving them to people to be productive.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I imagined 20 years ago when you first started, a lot of those technology decisions were probably, Hey, we just need a computer. Technology was not ubiquitous, as it is today. And culturally, it wasn't as formative. How have you seen that trend evolve? And is that one of the reasons why you believe culture plays a more important role in those technology decisions and that?

Tom Bradbury: A lot of the organizations that I've worked with and many or all organizations have a culture. And that culture either pushes people, whether challenge their comfort zone, or constantly look for things, whether they're policies, processes, tools, that match where they're going next. And sometimes there can be tension between that attribute of a given culture and what a domain expert sees, knows, and how they run their domain, whether it be an IT or HR or any other finance, right.

An IT leader, as an example that you bring up, where technology used to be, give me a computer and I'll plug it into the server or the switch plugs into the server. You know cloud, going to cloud. It sounds very easy today, right? And it's much more common, right. But still not as common as we probably think, in you know, many organizations. 

But that being said, operational experts knew how to not only understand, control, keep secure an environment that's on prem and the cloud technology and making that transition, which might offer more flexibility, efficiencies, costs, productivity, can impact positively all those things but it's out of their realm of experience, right? So, it was a challenge. 

So, it, wasn't only how do they navigate the company there, and are they comfortable navigating out of their comfort zone? It also is a paradigm shift internally for IT on how they operate right, in a cloud environment versus an on-premises environment. That would be another challenge that they have to deal with to get the whole staff to buy into. We no longer have control over how we upgrade. We receive notices that there will be an upgrade and we need to understand what it's going to do to our environment before we unleash it. 

Brian Ardinger: I used to work at Gartner. And that was one of the challenges that the IT group, were the gods and they controlled exactly what was displayed and put out there into the organization. And it seems to be much more collaborative environment now, where their power shifted. 

And because technology is ubiquitous across different verticals, and it's no longer a vertical in and of itself, per se.   It has definitely impacted the way people act and move and do things within organizations. Let's dive into the book. So, it's called The Culture Project: 30 Days to Reboot Your Organization. Tell us a little bit of overview of it and what people can get out of it. 

Tom Bradbury: So, when I wrote this book, it was informed by many workplace technology assessments that I performed either on my own, being invited by the client, or in conjunction with a partner, like a great partner of mine has been Cushma...