Michel Langlois Podcast Transcript
Michel Langlois joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast.
Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Michel Langlois. Michel Langlois is a distinguished senior executive with an impressive 30 plus year career in the networking and software industry. Michel’s leadership philosophy is rooted in his ability to transform organizations through strategic innovation and calculated risk taking.
He has a visionary leader consistently delivering results that drive operational excellence. The release of his long awaited book. Beyond the Code: Unveiling the Human Factor in Technology Leadership Innovation is now available on Amazon. As the former Chief Technology Officer and senior Vice President at Calix Networks, Michel drove market disruption and challenge conventional thinking.
His leadership and strategic vision scaled the company’s growth from 1 billion to 3 billion within five years.
Well, good afternoon, Michel. Welcome to the show.
Michel Langlois: I’m more than happy to be here. Thanks for inviting.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely Michel. I appreciate it. Making the time. We’re two time zones apart. You’re in Northern California? Yeah, they’re in Orinda. Appreciate it. Near Berkeley and I’m in Kansas City, so sometimes traversing the globe can be difficult, but today it’s pretty easy and I appreciate that.
So Michel, I’m gonna jump into your first question here. Having LED significant transformations that companies like Cisco, Juniper Networks and Calix, how did your leadership style evolve across these different corporate cultures and challenges?
Michel Langlois: So if you look at those three companies, they’re a tale of contrast.
If you want. The years of Cisco where I was there, it was more like the booming of the internet and the.com. So the leadership was at the time, much more technical, I will say, because we’re building the foundation that will become essentially routers switch firewall, not only for enterprise but also for service provider.
And we were trying to do data, voice, and video over a single medium if you want the internet. So it was largely technical at the beginning. I will say up to the years of 2000 when the bubble burst, and that’s probably where I learned to do management, because we went from the boom to the doom, and literally for 10 years after that, it was about rebuilding the business.
And I learned after that to manage people. Before that it was easy. You were throwing reward and stuck and people were motivated. Wasn’t really hard to manage people after that. It was like, how do I rebuild the trust with people that doubt there is a future in the company anymore? So it was also, how do you streamline the business?
We had to become much more efficient. We learn how to do partnership on a global scale. So it became much more into how do you. Have a common sense of purpose, if you want, moving forward. And how do people can feel that is still the place to be. So different time. The years at Juniper was more around re-engineering the company.
The company was 10 years old, uh, being extremely successful. Was respected as the high performance company, kind of the sport card in rotting at the time. So when I came there, it was more around they needed people to help with processes at scale, on the quality, on the development, on the productivity. So the challenge was I was coming from the nemesis of that company, so I couldn’t simply go and say, you’re gonna do it my way.
I have to figure out the ways to enlist the people into the mission and show we’re gonna carry through. So a lot of this was around building. Trust within the base, showing them a path where you could say, if you involve yourself in that mission, which is essentially transform engineering, we will carry through.
I have the support of the executive and instead of me telling you what to do, we’re gonna build a roadmap together. I’m gonna look at your pain point. I’m gonna look into your ambition. I’m gonna look into what you think needs to be redone or done in a different way and we’ll stitch this roadmap together and what carry true.
And I told them that, look, it’s like building a bridge. You can start from both sides, but if you don’t connect in the middle, everybody’s gonna look at this as being really ugly if you want. So we had essentially to get it through and that’s what we did after three years. Then I went to Calix, which was a company more around the edge to realize that if they don’t change completely the company from product to go to market to how they serve the service provider.
But more important how they become more subscriber or customer aware, the company will go belly up. The founder had this vision to say, one new software will be the most important thing for a company to have, not only from the ability to deploy at scale, but also how to generate revenue. If you want recurrent services, software as a services and all device will be connected to the cloud through a broadband connection, which happened to materials when, I mean, as you know, when we got COVID, we changed everything.
People realized the power of broadband. The lack of the quality of broadband, if you want. So that’s enabled the working from home that’s enabled tons of new application that will have probably never existed there. And my style of management there was to take a team, which has been seasoned, most of them were like 15 to 20 years in the company.
They’ve been through the wars. They used to be like hundred of company in the broadband. When I joined. They were left to treat that succeed. So it was more a mentality of surviving. And I was coming with the founder to say. We’re gonna change everything and we hire a new leader in sales and different type of leader that inject a different point of view.
So it was a time where it was probably hard for the people, and we have to reassess the talent and the go to market, the partnership. But it was really thrilling. It was like building a startup company and a public company if you want, but there was no safety net. So we had to basically communicate a lot more what we’re gonna try to do.
What we cannot do and ask the people to give it, you know, a last mile of effort if you want, and what will carry through the mission. So that’s a story of those three company and the way I change a little bit, my startup management to become much more inclusive and provide context to decision toward the the end if you want.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Yes, very much so. Appreciate that. And just to highlight a couple things, Michel, you’ve obviously worked at some great companies and early on, you know, leadership, uh, has evolved over the years. You take Cisco’s early days, for example, being very technical operations. Learning through some of the different challenges, like the.com burst and whatnot was a time that you really gotta build that trust.
It’s foundational. Of course. You know, as you moved on to companies like Juniper and Calx, you learned a lot through process transformation again. Building good teams is building that trust and you know, you just highlighted some very complex and diverse environments where you had to bring teams together and lead and be successful in these very successful Fortune 500 companies.
So I appreciate that, Michel, your new book, beyond the Code: unveiling the Human Factor and Technology Leadership Innovation, it emphasizes the importance of human-centric leadership in technology. What inspired you to write this book and what key message do you hope readers take away?
Michel Langlois: I think it’s combination.
A few things. I was asked by many engineers to say, young technical leader, director level, to say, how do you get one day to the C-suite? I thought it was just, you know, to be the best on the technical side, and then I’ll carry through. And then that was a discussion that opened the door to say, well, you know, it’s not about managing project that’s gonna be your success, but managing the business, the customer relationship.
Your ability to influence and guide as opposed to you do it yourself and enlist the people toward your, the same purpose if you want. So that was a realization that there was a story to tell there. There was also the reality that overall those year we had like, you know, technical training or no leadership training.
And it was mostly focused on the executive. I thought that there was not really a guideline that say, okay, if you’re gonna basically be running a large group like I had, how do you structure for efficiency? How do you organize the work? How do you create priorities? How do you place short-term, midterm, long-term investment?
That there was not really any book that described that. It was almost like. Have a kitchen and nobody put the recipe to to, to basically cook anything. So I thought there was a void there that I wanted to add a passion to do. And then the last straw was really people coming at me, especially the last two, three years, and I’m sure you hear that on your podcast all the time, is AI are gonna essentially eliminate engineer.
I wanted to see. For me, AI is like the.com or the software defined networking. It’s a technology that had, you know, radical implication. It’s disruptive, it will create good, it would create also bad, but ultimately it’s what we’re gonna do with it. So I wanted to do people to say, it’s not gonna replace the fact you need teams that are motivated, that are committed, that have courage, that have compassion if you want.
Because that’s the only way you’re gonna get the trust that you need to carry through and achieve the next summit if you want. So that was the sum of all of those things if you want, and, and my key message is simply to say managing people is not necessarily like guiding your family first. They’re not your, your family, their colleague and friends, and.
The ability you have to, you know, harness their potential is gonna be largely your ability to reach out to them and also support them when there’s gonna be issues or when there’s gonna be fallout. I was always from a camp to say, learn from your mistake and don’t do it three time in a row. That’s the key.
But, uh, when things happen that you cannot control, you just go through and figure out the path. And that’s the way I was trained and born on the farm. You can’t predict anything on the farm. You need people to operate your farm and uh, you need to be able to do your chore and everything else, otherwise it fall apart.
That was a kind of the thinking that led to this book. I.
Brian Thomas: Awesome. Thank you again, Michel. I like how you unpack some of that right there. You know the, the first question, how does an engineer get into the C-suite? Right? I know there’s a lot that goes into it, not just managing the project well, but you need to understand the business, the customer, the strategy, obviously building those relationships across the organization.
I’m glad you highlighted that. We never got that leadership manual or training. You know, as we graduated college, I think someone said that 68% of supervisors are thrown into a role without any training ever. So I’m glad the book will help leaders and new leaders coming up to help them guide. I. Their teams build that trust within their organization.
So thank you. And Michel, at Calix you champion the software-defined access. SDA architecture. Yeah. And cloud-based analytics. How did these innovations position calx to compete with larger industry players?
Michel Langlois: Well, there was three element of this. I mean, there was a lot, I mean, if you know, software defined networking, it was this notion that.
You will distribute the intelligence and there will be different type of capabilities you can enable and you will essentially do it either in a centralized way or distributed way. So when I went into the access market or the broadband and I knew nothing about it, I mean coming from no core networking or enterprise networking or service provider.
Access was kind of the last mile, the thing that connect to your home. But it was largely reduced to be kind of a dumb pipe. It was just essentially depending if you use cable, copper, or fiber, this medium will dictate essentially you experience in terms of capacity and speed. So when I sat down with the founder, we looked into what we could do.
One of our first goal was to say, remove all the constraint of access. It should be adaptive. It should be able to be first reliable. It should be able to provide different type of level of quality of services. And even more important, it should become completely transparent for the subscriber. ’cause if you’ve been in your home like I am, I’m the IT person in my home and every time the internet was going down, the kids will scream at me.
I don’t even know what they’re talking about, but they say the SSID is not working, daddy, go fix it. And I was like, my God. The first connect we have in the in the house is through wireless when you think about it these days. So why don’t we fix the wireless? Why don’t we fix the quality of the transport?
To the distribution point. And the last thing after that is can we have services provided to the cloud that monitor the customer quality at home? So you don’t have to be involved into this. Uh, I don’t think the analogy to see it’s a utility model where you turn a switch and you don’t think about it.
It’s more complex than that. But I think what we want is the subscriber to enjoy the services they need. And the networking or you know, the, the social networking they want without having to worry about is this thing is gonna work tomorrow. And that was kind of the key thing centric for us. In order to do this, we have to create the platform for the home, not a gateway at retail level.
It was a carrier class, uh, service delivery in the home. We had to retain the class of product that will be involved in broadband. So we took technology out of the enterprise and larger core network and changed the cus point, the form factor, and redesigned it for access to get more scale if you want.
And then the last thing is we went from typical hose base management, application like network management or customer services into completely cloud-based enabled architecture. If you want. Then be able to integrate data in such a way that we could have analytic and eventually make the network not only adaptive, but predictable.
So be able to predict fault and correct them before the end user even notice them. So that was essentially a vision and the fact that we needed to innovate because work literally competing with giant company like Nokia or Ywe at the time. What we’re outgunned by the number of people they can throw at it.
So the only way we could do it faster was to be more nimble. Increase the rate of delivery. Now four times a year is our release model and basically bring solution that have a differentiated value. And if you do this and then you are connecting well and know with your customer and you listen to them, that was a recipe to say, we’re gonna break apart if you want, we’re gonna take away.
And that’s what the company did.
Brian Thomas: Awesome. Thank you. Appreciate that. Just again, highlight a couple things. I think it’s important for our audience, uh, you know, when you move to Calix that SDA architecture was important to your organization, so you all started with the basics in that design, removed all the constraints to access, basically designing it for the lowest common denominator.
I. Home and what I like about being in the middle of some big competition, some big companies out there, you were able to make the network adaptable and predictable. And by being agile and bringing solutions that differentiated value, I think that was really important. And that’s what I highlighted, so I appreciate that.
Michel. Last question of the day. Looking ahead, what emerging technologies or trends do you believe will most significantly impact the networking and software industry, and how should leaders prepare for them?
Michel Langlois: I have experiment now with what AI can do with the next generation of product for designing.
I think the first thing is gonna change is your ability as a, let’s say as a small company to integrate technology from others is gonna be multiplied by 10 x, not only in the. So agent will be offered to you that streamline your processes of development. I mean, I’m so jealous when I see the tools available today that basically can do an analysis of the market chat, GPT, for example.
You can analyze a market, you can build a business plan, you can validate some assumption about it in matter of what minutes, 30 minutes at the longest if you want. And that give you a blueprint that you say, okay, if I marry that now to my age, ring. Science can basically bring these prototype or those MVP if you want, faster to market things that will update me maybe 18 months of investment.
I’m be able to do essentially a prototype within two to three months, and the technology is really there. That’s where I’m excited that the pace of innovation will multiply, will be shrink. I think what you’re gonna see also is the quality of the code will improve because. Okay, they’re probably gonna be 20 to 40% of the code generated by machine AI if you want.
But they’re also gonna be improvement in testing because testing, for example, is Ted years. You have to go through every, you know, logic in your code and validate that each one of them is thing. I think it will take the human error out of the game a lot, and my hope is the engineer are gonna spend more time to innovate.
To think about, you know, how to get to the next summit of innovation versus essentially just cocaine, the meal if you want. So I think there’s gonna be radical change there. And then everything else is also the go-to market. The other change I, I think will be significant will be the fact that you have access to funding.
In different ways, I think people are gonna be able to partner earlier with those startup or entrepreneurial company that struggle to basically, uh, break a wake because they’re stalling. If you want. I think there’s gonna ways to do partnership that help people to succeed better. And the trick there is to say it’s not about invention, it’s about innovation.
And I think every company moving forward is gonna have to become like a system integrator. Last is you focus on customer centric interaction is critical. I mean, gone are the days where you, you go to your customer with a product saying, oh, I’m in inventing fire. Ooh, take a look at this. I think our customer is, I.
Really well informed. They socialize among them themself. They see innovation from VCs, venture capitalists, you name it. They listen to what their needs of the company and the employee, and that’s gonna be a big thing. And one hope I have is I. Things like human motivation training, for example. Even recruiting is gonna be drastically different moving forward.
And my only hope is we don’t create a divide between experience in the workforce where there’s a bias a little bit against, you know, age if you want. These days, I think the, the company that will succeeding in the future will be the one that enlists the best brain and different age, integrate them together, rally them, and basically show that.
Doing a startup is one thing. Making it market leader is another thing. Emerging as a dominant player and re, you know, retain your position, that’s much harder also to do. And after that, you’re gonna have to reinvent yourself every five to 10 years. So how do you learn to do it? So I’m excited. I think there’s a lot of thing to do.
There’s also a lot of fears around, well, the technology displays, the human displays, the brain, and I believe that we’re gonna figure out these things hopefully with good compliance and regulation as well in the process. Because ultimately it’s gonna be about how people leverage your data, your analytic, your community, your market to create better solution if you want.
So a new, a new ground. Also on, on privacy if you want. So that’s bit the way I had at the world.
Brian Thomas: Thank you, Michel. I appreciate that. You did cover quite a bit there, but I think some of the things that I highlighted was leveraging, obviously ai, integrating the technology in your products and platforms is now going to grow tenfold, as you mentioned, again, leveraging AI in your daily designs.
But what’s cool is gonna bring efficiencies, remove errors, right? Yeah. Uh, allowing the human to bring higher level of innovation to the business. And of course the future is all about building customer-centric products. I mean, there’s a lot more we could talk about. There’s many, many hours of discussion around AI on the future and where we’re gonna head with innovation, but I really appreciate that, Michel.
It was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Michel Langlois: That was real fun, and thanks for doing the work you’re doing. I think this is great.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Michel Langlois Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
