94. Stephen Rose | From 5 Airborne to Tech CEO: Military Leadership, AI & Scaling Render Networks

In this episode, Klara Jagosova speaks with Stephen Rose, CEO of Render Networks, former Managing Partner at Nokia Bell Labs, and General Manager of Global Industries at IBM — a 25-year telecommunications and technology veteran who has built and led multi-billion-dollar businesses across four continents.

Stephen's journey spans serving in the elite British Army 5 Airborne Brigade, building a consultancy from zero to €11M and 90 consultants, leading Nokia's largest ever services deal at over $1B, reskilling 40% of IBM's global headcount, and now leading Render Networks at the most consequential moment in American broadband history.

The conversation explores: 

• What the 5 Airborne Brigade actually teaches you about leading people under pressure. 
• Why most leaders get hierarchy completely wrong — and the distributed leadership model that works. 
• How Stephen navigated engineering boardrooms for decades without a formal engineering degree. 
• How radical transparency got 40% of IBM reskilled faster than any performance review ever could. 
• Why fiber and electric infrastructure builds are now one race — and what the next 24 months look like. 
• How AI is reshaping how field crews build and verify networks at scale.
• The fear bubble framework for separating real risk from perceived anxiety.

🎗️ Stephen is running the annual Para 10-miler to support veterans battling cancer and suicide. Donate here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-our-fight-against-cancer-and-veteran-suicides

Connect with Stephen:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/thestephenrose/
stephen.rose@rendernetworks.com

Rebel Rebel Newsletter:
https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/rebel-rebel-7415159371611086850/

The Fear Bubble:
https://a.co/d/04ouny37

Music — Karl Jenkins, The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace:
https://youtu.be/nslz63M70c0?si=9zKhwrBp4hE2NzJ7

LEORÊVER COMPRESSION AND ACTIVEWEAR
Get 10% off Loerêver Balanced Compression and Activewear to elevate your confidence and performance

8 EIGHT SLEEP
Save $200 on 8Sleep and get better quality and deeper sleep with automatic temperature adjustment

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

This content is also available in a video version on YouTube.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone who may enjoy it as well, and consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also submit your feedback directly on my website.

Follow @GrandSlamJourney on Instagram, Facebook,  Twitter, and join the  LinkedIn community.

Transcript

Autonomy When Plans Break

Stephen Rose 0:00

It is training people to be able to work with degrees of autonomy and allow the training and the skills that you've given to them to kick in when it matters most. Yeah? And I think that's the same again, whether that's military or whether it's, you know, at a work situation, even within a meeting, you're doing a big bid and the bid starts to go haywire or suddenly you're throwing a curveball. You're not sitting there going, okay, here's the standard operating procedure for a non-standard situation. It doesn't make sense, right? So what it does do is you go, okay, I'm gonna trust the fact that the people in the team that I've got, they've put the same effort in that I have to be ready for the meeting. They've got the sense of self-awareness to know how to respond and when to respond. And situational leadership is a hugely important thing. And I'm a massive believer in distributed leadership. At any one point in time, whether it be in the military or whether it be in ordinary course of business life, turning to the person that can provide the best decision in any given moment and not running the hierarchy. In fact, the hierarchy should only be there where there is either an imparser on a decision or there is a vacuum of a decision. Yeah, then the leader should step in. And that's the job of a leader is to figure out where the best decision comes from. I think the second thing is that you need to make sure that you do things in such a way that you get the fastest possible outcome. Because in telco and electric infrastructure, speed is everything right now. So if you can make effective decisions and get speed in your decision making, and you can get speed in closing out the build of a piece of infrastructure, whether it be a fiber to the home or a piece of middle mile or long haul, getting that done at speed is so incumbent. I wish I could tie the value of our software to how many billions of dollars we're enabling.

Welcome And Steven’s Background

Klara Jagosova 1:44

Welcome to Grand Slam Journey, where sport, business, and technology collide. I'm your host, Clara Egoshova. This podcast is for anyone writing their next chapter, inspired by lessons sport has taught us. The mindset is transferable. Subscribe and let's go. Hello, Steven. Happy Friday. Welcome to the Grand Slam Journey Podcast.

Stephen Rose 2:03

Thank you very much. Great to be here.

Klara Jagosova 2:05

I'm privileged to have you as my guest. Thank you for accepting the invitation. We have had a few discussions together, and every time I come impressed with the way you lead and your background and experiences and how you have been navigating your journey. To add a quick introduction, you have played rugby, so transitioned from the rugby pitch and traded for a parachute, served in the British Army, five airborne brigades, which I want to dive into. I've been just researching the paras and the training and all that goes into it, operating in high-stakes environment. And then you have moved from being a founder to some of the largest companies in the world, Nokia Bell Labs, IBM, and now being the CEO of Render Networks, which I have been diving into all that you guys do. And it's a very interesting time in the industry given what's happening with the infrastructure. So you're navigating a very interesting space that is from my lens, ripe for innovation, which is where exactly you sit. So I'll step there and hand the mic over to you. Anything else you want to add, you would like listeners to know about you.

Stephen Rose 3:18

Sounds exhausting, doesn't it? I feel exhausted just having to listen to that. No, it's been a remarkable career in many respects, and I'd probably have outstripped my expectations of life by about 50. And if I died tomorrow, I don't think I'd be disappointed. But it hasn't come without cost, it hasn't come without sacrifice and a lot of pain at times, but it's all been worth it.

Klara Jagosova 3:39

I 100% agree. Just following your journey, I was like, I don't know how you have achieved all these things and the pivots you have. I'm curious about how our upbringing shapes us and then sets us up for the next path of the journey and the way we operate, function, lead our views on

Poverty, Resilience, And Rugby Culture

Klara Jagosova 3:58

the world. So I know when we chatted first, you had a quite dynamic upbringing. Curious if you want to share a little bit more about it or even rugby, how you found the sport, anyone who influenced you towards it.

Stephen Rose 4:09

I think our upbringers do shape us and I think they shape us forever. Those formative relationships and crucible experiences of, you know, everything from childhood. I mean, you know, in my particular instance, we weren't raised with a silver spoon in our mouth. In fact, it was probably very rusty. So my parents were both 17 years old when I was born. My mum was actually raised in a children's home. So she had a uh a particularly tough upbringing, and yet that shaped her, you know. So so we went through, you know, genuine poverty. I mean, we were really, really, as they would say in the UK, skint. Dad was a factory worker, you know, but you know, somehow we got through it. And probably, you know, the most remarkable person during my childhood upbringing was my mother. I mean, she was just a tour de force, I mean, just an absolute powerhouse of a woman who actually went to university eventually and came out to be, you know, a highly respected social worker and used all of her experiences as a child to actually then bring some real great stuff to children that were, you know, in a lot less fortunate position than I was, you know. So what did that do? Well, that taught me, you know, perseverance, toughness, getting down with the you know, uh tough times and just living with them, right? So that's a a great way to build resilience and whatnot. And I I guess then sports was a huge part of my life always. I wasn't really playing a ton of rugby when I was uh younger, when I was real young, but I really got into it after I came out of the army. Again, everything that comes with it. You know, rugby is a game of humility. You'll you'll see that nobody argues with the referee. You get told walk back 10 yards, you walk back 10 yards, you call the referees sir. Certainly when there were no female referees when I was playing, but you so you would, you know, address them as sir and you would do exactly as you're told. If you scored a try, you didn't go waving your arms everywhere and celebrating like you just won the lottery, you just walk back. And there's a lot to the sport that was that. And I think the other part was, you know, just teamwork and cooperation. You know, you can't be a hero on a rugby pitch. You could you could put in a good tackle and you know, you get a clap on the back for it, but you're expected to do the same thing again and again and again. And, you know, people just get on with their job. And it's the culture of the sport is very unique. And, you know, wherever I lived in the world, wherever I you know traveled in the world, first thing I did was join the local rugby club. Then you pick up 15 or 30 great mates almost instantaneously, and you, you know, you got a cultural emotion as much as you did the local rugby emotion as well. So those things, sports and those families' experiences have, you know, sort of always been a big part of my life and still remain influential to this day.

Choosing The Army And Brutal Training

Klara Jagosova 6:39

I want to add the army, the military background, when we chatted briefly, I've asked you how did you decide to go to army? You share that you always knew, so ever since you were a kid, which is really interesting. How do you go from always knowing when you were a kid to a journey that it didn't seem natural, actually for your background and your family as you shared upbringing and just that rigor to actually get to this specific group, Paris, that is one of the toughest in the world to qualify for and your training. So let us in a little bit at what that experience looked like, what was that inside knowing, and even just the training? I'm curious all that goes into it.

Stephen Rose 7:22

Yeah, well, it's hideous and it's still hideous to this day, and feels I still got the scars. No, I don't know why, because there was no influence, you know, from anywhere in my childhood that the army was something that I wanted to do, but I I decided that I would join the military. In fact, I wanted to join the Royal Marines and I just wasn't big enough. Yeah, 16 years old. We went to the army. I remember going to the Royal Marine recruitment office with my parents at 16 years old, and they looked at this skinny young man and just turned me away, said, you know, you just don't have what it takes right now. So so I went away for a few years, travelled, gained some weight, and came back and went to the British Army. The battalion that I was in joined Five Airborne Brigade. It was fantastic because when we joined the brigade, it was an opportunity to uh be tested. In fact, you know, the tests that they put you through are pretty immense. You know, there's a pretty famous course in the British Army called P Company, and that P Company test is made up of seven different tests, and they'll test you for you know all sorts of different kinds of running with weights on your back over, you know, long distances, 10 miles, 20 miles. There's an event called milling, which is, you know, the longest minute of your life, which is when you're you put on 16-ounce boxing gloves, and then you punch each other until one of you doesn't stand up or it stops at one minute, but you're not allowed to defend yourself. So, you know, again, a lot of physical tests. But but interestingly enough, the army wasn't really all about just toughness and shooting a gun and you know all of that bravado. It was something that was really about how to learn to get on with others. You're thrown into a room, 30 people, and you don't know these people. You have no idea. They all come from different backgrounds. Some of them were years and years and years of having family who were part of the military, they understood the military system. It was almost a rite of passage for them. And then there were those of us that always knew we were going to do it, but didn't have uh any other information or whatever it was that was going to inform that it was a good decision. And so you rock up, and probably in 30 days with 30 guys in the platoon, you have 29 fights, you know, just some of them probably a little bit more physical than others. Most of it's handbags at 10 paces, to be fair. But it is really about just trying to find a way to navigate a very, very intense situation. And that teaches you a lot. And then you've got to get on, you know, over the next, you know, sort of three and a half, four years. You've got to make sure that you're working with people that you train with every single day, you have high dependency on, you learn about communications, you learn about operating under stress. And there's a lot that you go through. And when you go through those times and you have to trust the person to the left and your right that something's gonna go well for you, or that they could have got your back during periods of stress. And, you know, we went through some of that stuff. It was just a brilliant environment to learn in. And something, again, to this day, whether you're going into a situation that an arm, you know, the army would deal with, or whether you're in business and you're going into battle against your competition, you still need to have all the things that are right. You still would have leadership, you still would have skills, you've got to be rehearsed in the things that you're doing, you've got to make sure that you're communicating well, you've got to make sure that you're doing effective decision making. All of those things apply up to this day. So I think um the army was a massive, massive influence for me. Still is, I would go through the whole thing again. As miserable as it was, I'd do it all again.

Klara Jagosova 10:33

You've shared, but I want to drill a little bit deeper. You described your upbringing. There was already tough. I often find sometimes the tougher the upbringing, it really creates this grit and preserverance. One of the things maybe I'll compare it is to UFC. I have not seen awesome USD fighter that comes from like a really great background. The harder the upbringing, the better they become because they just have this ability to push through pain. Do you think that there was that through line because you never had anything easy in your upbringing that propelled you to be able to suffer more through those hard times that training can be able to handle that intensity in a different way than perhaps other people do that may have it easier?

Stephen Rose 11:21

I think there are many influences that sort of coming into your life. So, yes, there's no question that if you had a tough upbringing and things didn't come easy to you, and you know, you didn't have fashionable clothes like all the other kids did, or all of those things, right? You know, the all the small things that, you know, that suddenly add up to big things over time, they do bring uh mental toughness to you, or they'll put you into a situation where you lose all your confidence. And if we're really honest, probably a little bit of both exists, right? I uh had to navigate much later parts in my career where I didn't have my education behind me, and you sort of walk around with imposter syndrome pretty strongly, yeah, for many, many, many years, right? So dealing with that, but I think it isn't just those things. What I found attractive about the army was the sense of belonging. You know, there was just community, family, belonging to a cause that you really believed in. And it didn't need to be necessarily what was going on politically, and it was, in my case, an allegiance to the queen at the time. And, you know, she was my boss, right? Ultimately, she was my boss. Yeah. And I am a royalist and I was more than happy to serve my country and all of that sort of stuff. It all came into the mix. But it was really at the local level, it was really that I had friends and I belonged to something, and I had identity, and and it was really strong and it was stable. As chaotic as it was in the work, the structure, the systems, the sense of belonging, the sense of purpose, the self-belief that did the army drilled into me all came into uh serving me so well for the rest of my life.

Impostor Syndrome And Learning By Risk

Klara Jagosova 12:53

You mentioned impostor syndrome, which I appreciate. I think there was this new narrative, and I hear it even more for women, actually. This women suffer imposter syndrome. I actually didn't know what that word was rudely until maybe several years ago, five, six years, I took one of the Stanford to continue education class, and they sort of served this to you as like women have this impostor syndrome, as like, sure, I have never been too confident myself, I never fit into the standard norms. I think that's partially what drove me to tennis to have my own outlet. And so you had your own experiences actually find that the imposter syndrome, if you use it in the right way, can help you. You just have to overcome not being stuck in it. And that's I feel like I heard you say it's you found an outlet, how to not be pushed by those feelings. And I appreciate you sharing it because it equals everybody has it, men and women equally. I think we just feel like it's okay to talk about it perhaps more than men don't bring it up that often. But it's how do you deal with it and doing things despite of feeling uncertain and that seemed like really you put into practice and you get trained, obviously, probably more in that. I cannot imagine those missions that you are put into and probably just a bunch of unknowns, and you just gotta figure out how to make it happen.

Stephen Rose 14:16

From my perspective, because not everybody's gonna go through the same thing. The military taught you how to do things like have a grip on, you know, your own anxieties and fear. Because going into battle, you know, or going into any conflict situation, the mental preparedness for that is tough. I remember, you know, one particular event we were going to go to, we were on two hours to notice to move or whatever it was. And um, we had the the wives and the and the girlfriends come and say goodbye to their husbands. So we all gather together and everybody says goodbye in this incredibly melancholy way. Yeah, just a really weird environment. It happened to be a foggy day, everything's just really weird set up. And then you push off, yeah, you're focused, and then you have to rely on your training, and you have to rely on the people that are around you and the drills and the skills, as they would call it, yeah, that you would you'd have pulled together. That's gonna get you through some of that stuff, yeah. And so there's an element of fear that you've got to be over to come. Then there's self-doubt and uncertainty and imposter syndrome that I probably experienced more in my later years because I was going into professional environments where I didn't have an education. I certainly wasn't an engineer, and yet I was working in, you know, high engineering functions. But the benefit was that I had nothing to lose. I didn't have, excuse the phrase, but I didn't have a pot to piss in. Yeah. So it really made no difference to me whether I took a risk or not, because at that time I was 25, 26 years old. I wasn't, you know, stacked up with cash or anything like that. And so I took risks. And those risks were experiences. And, you know, one of the first chances that I had was right at the beginning of my career to go to Poland and to learn telecom. I remember sitting down with a couple of guys, Scott Oberlander and Andre Osinski. I still remember to their names, and I sat down with them and they were teaching me about what radio networks were all about and what microwave was all about and what core networks did and a few others. There's a wonderful guy, unfortunately, passed away called Nigel Giddings. He was a guy that ran operations in in many great environments. And they were kind enough to sit with me and go through all that they had to know and laughing about how little I understood about, you know, all of these different systems. But I was able to go to them with the humility to say, look, guys, I don't know this stuff. Can you help me understand it? And we liked each other enough that they were willing to make that investment with me. Having the willingness to accept and the humility, I suppose, to accept that you don't know a lot, but you're showing willingness to invest in that. People respond well to. And then, you know, taking those risks, like I was saying. So all of those things combined was just a great opportunity. And so as a result of that, I sort of tuned my brain over time to get accustomed to rest taking. So then as I grew older and took more in my career, you know, the decisions that I was taking that to some people were deeply uncomfortable, I was really comfortable with taking those risks by then. But that was only because I'd started with nothing to lose. And then over time, yes, you gain stuff, right? Houses and cars and whatever it is, but the training your brain on how to manage and take risk is something that you could build over time. And then the last point on this, you know, I know I'm talking a lot, sorry, is how much emphasis you put on that stuff as well. If you are governed by the size of your house and how many cylinders your cars have and whatever else, yeah, you're always going to be taking less risks. I personally don't really care about that stuff too much. I mean, yes, I like to have a nice house and a nice car and da-da-da-da-da. You know, does it define me? Absolutely not. Yeah. I've always been divine by the experiences that life can give you, and I've always gravitated to them much more than I have the stuff that comes along with it.

Klara Jagosova 17:48

Love that and that experience definitely, the pivoting is at least as I study your background, seems to be so true to you. I do have a few questions, and I want to go back a little bit to the military, but want to touch on the risk taking. Studying your journey and your path, do you actually get addicted to taking those risks? Because if you don't take risks every so often, life can feel kind of boring and mundane. How do you perceive that now? Do you feel like you're still pushed towards taking that risk every so often? Like living in this zone of boredness versus reinventing yourself every so often? How do you balance it?

Stephen Rose 18:28

Coming out of the army, you know, that was when really rugby took off because that was the next thing that was going to really challenge me physically. I'm not the biggest guy, and I'm dealing with guys that are, you know, six foot six and you know, 125, 140 kilos at times and, you know, able to uh to knock you backwards pretty easily, and you still got to tackle them, right? You, you know, you'd be more embarrassed by the missed tackle than you were by, you know, so you'll put your body on the line for that. But then after that, yeah, after rugby it was mountaineering. Now I'm back to doing some of the silly runs that I'm doing, which is all the way back to going back to the old, the old place that I used to run at the army. So I think I do enjoy pushing myself to limits where I'm right, right, right at the edge of whether I know I'm going to achieve it or not. You know, for me, if I if I know that I'm gonna get something done and I can achieve it from the outset, I'm not motivated by it. And that also goes to not just sports challenges, but business challenges or whatever, you know, I put myself through a master's a few years back at at Oxford, and I had to convince Oxford University that they should accept me. And I didn't have an undergraduate degree, they wouldn't even touch you ordinarily, and yet they still were willing to accept me on the course. And and then I studied like a lunatic all the way through it and came out with a with a pretty good result. And I had no idea whether I was gonna achieve that from the outset. So, you know, those things, and it's the same where I am right now. I mean, you know, we're in private equity, we've got a great business, a great board, a wonderful product, but there's no guarantee of success, of course. That's part of the motivation for sure.

Klara Jagosova 19:59

I think there's never any guarantee in success. And I always say that things that really always matter are never the ones that come in the easiest. It's the grit and the effort that in many ways makes them special once you achieve it. If if it's too easy, I also think, or personally, I've never valued a thing as much as when I really had to put a hard work into it, which sometimes like, Jesus, can I just make my life easier? Why am I making it more complex than I should? But I do want to go back to your battlefield, and I don't know how much you're open or willing to share. I don't know if it's this is private, but to me, it seems you are in this super special force that are deployed very strategically. How do you balance from my lens and just you correct me if this is different? There's for sure must be a good sense of plan and strategy. And then you gotta figure out how to navigate the situation, whether it's really as true or different. So there's a lot of chaos, and there must be an improvisation somewhere in between. How do you navigate this little goal strategy and plan through that chaos and improvise to achieve the goal?

Distributed Leadership And Decision Rights

Klara Jagosova 21:09

Is that accurate?

Stephen Rose 21:10

It is. One thing I've found, you know, about the British Army is that they had an incredible way of actually being able to put structured, you know, sort of ways of working around chaotic situations. And also, you know, there was a misnomer around how the army works. I think you know, most people tend to think that it's this, you know, super hierarchical, top-down, you know, brainless bunch of you know, infantry soldiers that are running towards take that hill. It's just not true. You know, there's an element of courage and bravery that goes along with the take that hill. And believe you me, you know, if you've anybody that's been in any kind of conflict, if they say they weren't scared, they're lying. It is very, very scary. But actually, what it is, it is training people to be able to work with degrees of autonomy and allow the training and the skills that you've given to them uh to kick in when it matters most. Yeah. And I think that's the same again, whether that's military or whether it's, you know, at a work situation, even within a meeting, you're doing a big bid and you know, the the bid starts to go, you know, haywire or, you know, suddenly you're throwing a curveball. You're not sitting there going, okay, here's the standard operating procedure for a non-standard situation. It doesn't make sense, right? So what it does do is you go, okay, I'm going to trust the fact that the people in the in the team that I've got have got this, they've put the same effort in that I have to be ready for the meeting. They've got the sense of self-awareness to know how to respond and when to respond. And situational leadership is a hugely important thing. And I'm a massive believer in distributed leadership. So I think, you know, at any one point in time, whether it be in the military or whether it be in ordinary course of business life, turning to the person that can provide the best decision in any given moment and not running the hierarchy. In fact, the hierarchy should only be there where there is either an impasse on a decision or there is a lack of, you know, there's a vacuum of a decision. Yeah, then the leader should step in. But actually, in most given situations, if you ask the question, can you or you or you provide the best answer, you'll find it. Yeah. And and and that's the job of a leader, I think, as well, is to figure out where the best decision comes from. It isn't to be providing the best decision. In fact, if it would come to me, you know, that'd probably be a disaster.

Klara Jagosova 23:26

Distributed leadership is what it sounds like. I was listening to a couple of your episodes you were on. I think they were from earlier, you were on Nokia Podcast and you actually talked just about ad corporate leadership. How do you default to your experts and empower them to make the right decision? And just from brief interactions, even I have had with you, it seems like how you run your CEO job even now. It's just putting people as experts in their roles.

Stephen Rose 23:55

And it's it's actually figuring out two things. One is where's the chemistry in teams? And the second thing is then combinations of skill set. So if you look to any good leadership practices, it's always coupling those things together. In fact, I was talking to a leader last week and he was talking to me about how he sets teams up and how he runs them. And it was, it was really great to hear. You don't often hear it, to be fair, because most organizations are set up in rigid structures and whatever else. But the way I like to think about an organization is that they're just units of people that are housed under a leader. And then actually there's a problem to be solved for, and that problem to be solved for, you pick who you think are the best people from those different skill domains and you put them together and you agree a problem statement, and then you solve that problem over time. And I think, yes, you can have organizational workflows, big processes, and that they're very important. There's no question there's very important. But when you've got a special problem or a unique problem, this that's extraordinary, being able to operate like that gives you a lot more agility in the moment and it gives you a lot more effectiveness in the decision making.

Klara Jagosova 25:05

How much do you think does the leadership framework you have been taken on and learned through books or school versus going back to your army brigade? Where do you think this originates your view on the leadership, or has it been enhanced even through different experiences later on?

Stephen Rose 25:23

Both. I was always surprised when I came out of the army how much I'd learned more than I expected just to be able to, you know, shoot a gun straight and run fast. Yeah. I mean, that was genuinely what I thought I was going to come out like. And it just wasn't that at all. Those practices I've used and just refined and refined, but the but the belief that it starts with the belief that there is a you know a clear, you know, set of communication about what the mission is and why the mission matters, yeah, starts with that, right? So again, same in business. You wouldn't change that for the world, yeah. And then organizing for success, assembling the right types of people and skills, yeah, breaking the problem down into small enough chunks that you're they're understandable and solvable, yeah. And then making sure that the people on the team understand to what degrees of of autonomy they can operate, where do they have decision-making rights? And then where they're coming in, where they have an impasse, you insert yourself at the point of impasse or vacuum, and that's you know where you come in. And and whether that is the military or whether that's in business life, they they really are almost operating on the same, the same principles. I think where organizations get it wrong is when they take traditional, well, they're not always bad, uh, they're not always misnomers, but you s you can see armies in the world, military units in the world that believe wholeheartedly in top-down hierarchy. And to some extent, people in the unit are the means to the to an end, uh, but they're not an end in themselves. I think that's a very, very dangerous mindset. Yeah, and that's where you make big sacrifices and you know you start to become a little bit psychopathic, frankly speaking. So again, where you see those practices, whether they be in the military or where you whether you see them in an organization, you see a lot of failure and a lot of pain that people go through.

Klara Jagosova 27:08

I also want to tap into the mindset that you shared just a while ago about being able to operate under stress and have that ties to the corporate world. And we even share from my experience, I feel my tennis and the high pressure moments help me understand how my mind works, and then I can try to translate that state of mind into important meetings or how I feel. I need to feel and act and operate. There's some level of skill that I've learned through the sport that I can apply later on. Is it the same for you? Do you feel like being in the army I can and the stakes are obviously much higher than a tennis match and win or loss? Although we always feel like our ego is gonna die when we lose a match. But obviously, you you're literally gonna lose a mission and lose a life, potentially a life of your closest people that you have been working with and and living with for quite some time and traveling with for for these special missions. So I I feel like that's even much higher, obviously. Stakes is that directly transferable to those situations? Do you feel like there's some unique mindset you have been able to gain from there?

Stephen Rose 28:19

I think so. There's a great book written by a guy called Aunt Middleton called The Fear Bubble, and in there he talks about managing fear and you know when you should reserve fear as well. And it's something that is probably taught across special forces and the rest of the army now, uh, because you know, so it's a brilliant way of just controlling stress and controlling fear. And he talks about this idea that you know you're being told, you know, when you're going to go into battle, and at that certain point you have to get your kit ready, and then you go into a car, and then you go into a helicopter, and then you know, uh you go into the point of contact, and right before the you know the point of contact, you know, of course, your um adrenaline is through the roof, but actually at no point up until that moment are you in danger. Yeah? No, at no point, yeah. Until you're right behind that point of contact. So the question is, can you train your mind to be worried about the things that you should be worried about at the moment that it really matters? Yeah. And I think most people just carry too much anxiety and they carry too much worry. They're always worrying about the future and whatever else. But the reality is that most of those fears are connected to something else that has informed, you know, the way that their minds work. So what I try and do is I try and just decide, okay, first off, is this a perceived concern or is this an actual concern? Yeah, I try and make those distinctions. I try not to worry about the things that I can't change. I just accept them. Yeah. And the things that I can change, well, then change them. It's that simple, really. And then that way you drop out a lot of the anxiety, and that is what, you know, you're able to um to then put all your energy into the things that matter. Because worrying about stuff, I mean, anxiety is such a drainer of energy, it's not even funny. Yeah. Um, and it's slightly different on the tennis court, I can imagine, because you know, you're you're uh equal in the game, you know, it's the final serve before you're gonna win the match, and you've got to make sure you've got the right there's fear through the through the sky. But in the business world, you don't have that kind of intensity. You've got a long runway and you've got a lot of line of sight to the problems that you can manage, yeah. It's just whether you start tackling or not, or whether you procrastinate, you allow these fears to bubble up in your mind, and then before that, they've consumed you and you don't really know what to go. So I think you know, there are just so many ways you can solve for that. But probably the first way is get on top of them, don't procrastinate to them.

Klara Jagosova 30:39

I love it in intensity. I love the word, I wrote it down. It's definitely how I see you being able to embrace it through your different stages of your life.

Knowing Your Team Through One-To-Ones

Klara Jagosova 30:49

One more thing, touching on the army, you had mentioned earlier, just the importance of getting to know the team, because you're all on a mission, you may be in a different state of mind and different level of tiredness versus recovery when you go into these high critical situations and you need to operate as a team. How do you reflect on it and how do you see that it has shaped you?

Stephen Rose 31:12

I'm always surprised when I'm having discussion with, you know, previous organizations. I think my current team does a really good job of this, but I've been in previous roles where my leaders just don't know their team. You know, they don't know what their family situation is, or they have no idea what matters to them or what they did last weekend or whatever it is, you know, and I'm staggered just to how far away they are. And I'm able to say, you know, oh, I've spoken to, you know, whatever, X, Y, Z employee, and you've got a reasonable understanding of their life. And the leader says, Oh, I didn't know about them. And it's it's not just about because you care, because I do care, but actually you get to hear what matters to them, you know, which stage of life are they just about to buy a house? Are they just about to, you know, have children? Are they just uh about to go on a world trip? Are they thinking about doing a different type of education? All of those things, once you get to know these people, you can start to tune what the organizational goals are to what the individual goals are much more accurately, much more surgically. And I think that's such an important thing. So getting to know people, yeah, you'll get to know how they operate and what they're really good at. But you'll also understand not just those things extrinsically and intrinsically, what really matters to them. And that changes over time. So keeping abreast of that, even in the smallest of meetings, is a really important thing to do.

Klara Jagosova 32:32

Do you have any tips or shortcuts how to achieve that effectively, or you're just figuring out this is what works for Steven, anything you would suggest people to apply?

Stephen Rose 32:41

It sounds so trivial and people will almost laugh at it, but weekly one-to-ones. There are so few organizations that do weekly one-to-ones where they're not discussing work. Yeah? So I do one-to-ones with my leadership team every single week. First question I ask them is, what do you want to talk about? No, what do I want to talk about? Yeah, it doesn't matter what I want to talk about because if I want to understand what's going on in my team, I could set up a performance review, or I could set I have the monthly MBRs and da da da. You know, I've all manner of forums. This is my chance to get that person to say, this is what I'm worried about, this is how I'm feeling, and this is what I'm thinking about. So the the one-to-one to break it up into the first few minutes is is just how are you feeling? What do you want to talk about? Anything going on that's particularly bothersome or you know, anything you really want to talk about that's positive. Then we typically talk about things that they're doing around how they're skilling themselves. Are they building on the repertoire of skills? Are they networking? Are they reading? Whatever it is that you know they're they're doing to learn, yeah, and grow. And then the question, the third question is how does that contribute to where you want your career to go? And I'm not actively, you know, encouraging people to run after the next promotion necessarily or to leave the company, but I am, I do have an obligation to that person to say, hey, I want you to become become the best person you can become. I'm gonna bet on the fact that if I'm doing that, you're gonna want to stay with us. But if you don't and you go somewhere else, well, you're gonna go somewhere else and you know, maybe you're gonna become our next customer. Yeah. So, you know, I have a lot of faith in good faith, yeah, and doing the right thing.

Klara Jagosova 34:15

That sounds like an impressive, just stellar leadership, Steven. Um I'm gonna jump to the transition, something really challenging. I find at least for athletes, it's always hard to leave the athletic world and then figure out what to do next. Most of us don't consider what else other than the sport we actually enjoy. I'm curious how that is for you and the army, because it might might be something for at least from my lens for even much more intense. And to your earlier words, just that the trust and the sense of purpose and the teamwork you have with your group is probably beyond anything. I can imagine, but I don't think I can fully feel it unless you actually experience it. So, how have you moved from there? How's that transition for you? You shared you found rugby as kind of the outlet to perhaps replicate a little bit of that environment, but then moving on even to the professional world, how have you uncovered? I want to go through this quite deeply technical telco field, how you navigated that whole space.

Stephen Rose 35:15

By the way, I I genuinely think that if you take a sport seriously and you are still in the, you know, very, very low amateur leagues, who cares? You take it very seriously, it means something deeply to you. You train really, really hard for it. You might not be the best, but the stress and the pressure that you put on yourself to be the best that you can be, I don't think that's any different from the most elite soldier that actually has the same thing. Because they're going at it with exactly the same commitment. And I think that should never, you know, sort of underestimate what it means to be committed to something, regardless of, you know, where you are in the pecking order of brilliance. Yeah. And what I mean, you know, technical brilliance, not necessarily brilliance as a person. For me, the sports has stayed part of me, the military is, in a sense, stayed part of me. Where I use it now is it's sort of in combinations of those things. So I did this uh this run, the Powers 10 last year, I'm going to be doing it again this year. Lord knows why, you know, it's it's hard work, it's backbreaking, literally. But actually, what I do is I use it for two things. I use it to keep myself going, it's something to aim towards. I somehow always needed that. If it wasn't a big mountain that I was climbing, then it needed to be something like this. But then now we're mixing it with combinations of fundraising. So we're doing it this year for Patrol Base Abate, which is a magnificent organization uh introduced to me by a guy called Nate Boas, who's an ex-marine himself, and and these guys are supporting ex-military men and women who've gone through that and come out the other side with probably a lot of PTSD and all other mental health issues and are feeling suicide or, you know, uh considering suicide. And they pick these people up and they don't necessarily rescue them all the way through to full recovery, but they intercept them at this amazing place in Montana. And so, you know, for me, when I do the 10 miler and I will be in agony doing it this year, you know, knowing that it is connected to a cause like that, you know, to brilliant people who commit a lot of their personal time to helping others, it's a small price to pay. So we all win. Yeah, we all win. And so incorporating that desire to stay fit and, you know, somehow still stay connected, and at the same time, whilst doing it for a great cause and incorporating that with work, it's wonderful.

Career Pivots Across Nokia And IBM

Klara Jagosova 37:24

Moving on to your next journey, you have founded your own company, consulting company at 30 years old. You've worked in some of the most innovative big corporations, such as Nokia Bell Labs, IBM. Where do you want to start? What was that journey from there? How did you end up even in telecommunications as the path? You actually still live now at an interesting intersection, telco infrared, but also enterprise software platforms and optimizing that whole space. It's a quite big journey. We could be here for maybe even an hour. Like, what do you want to touch on, Steven?

Stephen Rose 37:56

It was a couple of things. One, I said, I think earlier on it was about taking risks. As I progressed through my career, I started to realize and I really had a keen eye on what was coming. Yeah. So whether it was, you know, where networks were going or what it was like to transform a telecom operator, because I was obviously worked in telecom operators on the other side as a consultant, figuring out that those businesses had to change in order for them to grow. Yeah. And, you know, they're still finding pathways for that to this day. So then lifting your head up and saying, well, what does that mean to me? And if I look at, you know, where technology is going, if I look at the kind of business challenges that are going to appear over the five years, how ready am I for that? I made career changes and I had decisions around my career relative to those things. So, you know, I started out in at the beginning of Nokia and strategy and organizational development, um, to some extent in services. And then I realized, actually, I want to get promoted in this company. I want to go, okay, well, that means I've got to move to Moscow. So I moved to Moscow. Yeah, got a promotion, moved to Moscow, stayed there for a couple of years nearly. And then I realized, hmm, there's a bigger problem inside of Nokia. And Nokia was going through some, you know, issues at the time. So, okay, I want to be part of that. And that exposed me to McKinsey and working very directly with the McKinsey team who taught me how to problem solve and, you know, all that training, I think it was from problem statement to storyline and various other bits of training that I was able to receive. And so you were really actually understanding how to tackle transformational problems inside of an organization. And then the next thing was like, well, I want to run a big business now. Okay, so I then, you know, got a job as, you know, the global head of sales for care business. It wasn't the most exciting business, but it came with billions of dollars attached to it. So now I've got the next tick, yeah. And then the last one was really about, okay, I really want to do something right at the cutting edge and manage to find my way into the Bell Labs leadership team and working with some brilliant minds. And man, I mean, that was a crucible experience. And it was also uh pretty uh pretty intense, you know, uh, and overwhelming. Turning up into the room and having Marcus Weldon, who was the CTO and president of Bell Labs, who's got his PhD from Harvard, of course he has, you know, and everybody else around the table saying, I'm Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, and then turn up to me and I'm Mr. You know, so and it's you just realizing, my goodness, you know, I'm amongst giants, you know, intellectual giants here. But learning that, learning that environment, and then, you know, also recognizing I've hit my limit at what I think I want to learn inside of Nokia. And then the transition into IBM was okay, so go from networking and big business into then figuring stuff out that was really going to be about running uh cloud and AI. Yeah. And so, you know, where I am today is it's the culmination of all of those things. It's cloud, it's AI, it's network, it's telco, it's transformation, it's digital, bringing all of that together. And that's why I'm here at Render.

Klara Jagosova 40:50

I love how you highlighted a journey that really stands out from even the podcast that I've listened to, they're from early 2020, I think 2021, 2022. You're talking at depth about the lack of innovation in the telco industry. You talk at depth about setting the right goals, the difference between KPIs and OKRs. I'll attach the links to this episode because I find they're even more relevant now than they were back then. And the steps you're suggesting, I don't think they're being implemented. And then at IBM, having the operators' mindset, you have run multi-billion dollar business across banking, telco manufacturing, oil and gas, and more. So you have this holistic experience, not just telco, which actually often find if you look at industries also outside of telco and step a little bit around to see what the challenges are, you can start actually much easier replicating and borrowing things from what's working here versus what should be implemented here, and stripping yourself of that status quo, at least from my expertise in telco, the more you are in, the more you just stick in with the status quo mindset if you don't step outside and borrow some things from the other industry. So, how do you feel this variety and the full view helps you drive the leadership and success to the next level and how you're applying it now at render networks?

Stephen Rose 42:21

The career path really was about just getting diversity of experience and culture, you know, whether it was, you know, working in Russia or the Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands and Australia and Slovenia and Switzerland and God knows where, you know, how many countries, right? So, so you know, diversity of culture. Then there was, you know, diversity of experience in industry. But I think what you've got to do is you've got to do that ahead of the game. You've got to say, okay, you know what? What do I not know? What do I need to learn in order for me to be useful and hireable? Why am I investable as an individual? And it's not having that arrogance to sit there and say, actually, I'm always going to be investable. Absolutely not. You should be almost semi-permanently paranoid that somebody's going to, especially in today's technology age, that somebody's going to be able to do your job for you within, you know, a few strokes of a keyboard. Yeah. So I think it is just continuously looking back and saying, okay, am I ready for the next five years? And that's the way that I used to do it. And I'm still doing it. I'm midway through a five-year journey uh at the moment. And I'm already thinking about the next five years. And I know exactly what that'll be, and it'll probably be something around business development and growth, but it'll also probably include something around uh teaching. And I'll probably go back and do a DBA or a PhD or something like that, and that'll get me through the next 10 years. Yeah. And hopefully somebody will find that worthwhile picking up with any

Why Telco Struggles To Grow

Stephen Rose 43:43

luck.

Klara Jagosova 43:43

So reflecting on what you have learned through how this impressive journey, looking at all of those different chapters that touched on different parts, at minimum, of the telco and beyond. What do you see the telecommunication industry is still doing? Wrong or not really stepping into the full power, the mindset to adopt to actually evolve and thrive. Because that's everybody's trying to figure out telco has been shrinking. I have more than ever get things from my telco team. Oh, I got laid off because everybody's trying to trim down. It's the race to the bottom, cutting costs. Which seems they actually need to start doing things smarter and pushing towards now AI and really implementing AI in the right way. But there's also a lot about innovation, business model innovation, the network APIs, you name it, LSTAP, because I can probably be here for quite a while naming things. How would you characterize some of the key things they're missing or that that needs to be focused on?

Stephen Rose 44:39

I think we need to still recognize it's a fundamentally important industry. You know, I mean, whether it be um electric or telco or government or banking, those are the four industries that pretty much keep all the other industries going. Yes? So it is an incredibly important industry. And the telco industry has probably created more value because it exists in the world than any other industry contributing to other industries. Yeah. In fact, I did some research on that a few weeks ago, and it's in the trillion. So it's a two trillion dollar industry, but it's probably contributed something like 15 to 20 trillion dollars to the world every year. It it enables that. So it's an incredibly important sector, but it has struggled to find growth. I think there's a few reasons. One is I think it's been regurgitating the same leadership years and years and years ago. We sort of all come with a formula, and I could probably put myself right in the center of that. But I don't think there has been enough outside expertise from other industries brought into telco to get them to think differently. I think we still are taking technologies and breaking it up into small things called subscriptions, and we're selling those subscriptions, and nothing changes there either, really. So the business model has ostensibly not changed over the course of you know many, many, many years. So I think the opportunity for telco is actually to take a different look, not look at AI, because AI is just another technology that will come in. It's a phenomenal technology, it will game change the world. But if you say actually AI is our opportunity, I think that's a silly answer. I think you have to look at it and say, what's your core theory of value? What do we do really well? And I think what telcos do really well is they have trust. If you're a utility provider, you have an enormous amount of trust. You have contact centers, you have brilliant ways of using customer data. So actually, I would say instead of just thinking about telco, telco, telco and connectivity, I'd actually be thinking if I really want to grow the business and be something useful, I'd be thinking, how do we do banking? How do we do insurance? How do we other do other types of services? How do we create different types of offers where the core way the banks operate is very similar to these other industries. And yes, with AI, you'd actually be able to do even more clever stuff with that. So you could start bundling subscriptions. And if you look at a couple of firms that have done that really, really well, you'd look at Rackerton, because Rackerton started out with 70, I think it was 70 uh different applications, then it became an MVO, then it came in network. Now it has a range of services, then it has credit cards. And so it starts to become a very, very clever core uh theory of value. And the other ones to look at is TELUS in Canada. For years and years and years, Darren and Whistle and the team over there have done really, really well to figure out how to play, be in the healthcare sector, pull out of different parts, and they've done some MA stuff that has clearly always added, you know, value over time. And so there are opportunities and there are good examples, but it's just not pervasive enough.

Klara Jagosova 47:35

I love that. And that became clear to me too uh when I was in one of my previous roles, I worked with broad scale of telcos, and then you quickly realize that they're actually quite different and different parts they operate very differently and they have very different established brands, especially you mentioned Rakuten in Japan. The Japanese carriers have very different brand naming and businesses and the way they operate in Japan. Let's say here in the US, that is very just type of utility telco-based. They haven't innovated much to your point on the business models or some of the other areas. Before we transition to render and you take in on the CO role render, anything you want to reflect on before we dive into what you're building now, some key experiences or things you want to highlight.

Stephen Rose 48:17

The most important thing is to have people around you and recognize that whatever you've achieved in your career is not all to do with you, not even by a long margin. There are three or four people in my my life, you know, right at the beginning of my career, there's a guy called Wimberbake, who to this day, you know, 30 years later, is still, you know, somebody that I remember as being one of the most humble, brilliant people, and just looking up to this person almost as a father figure and thinking, wow, this guy's impressive. And then a few others, you know, Henrik Sheving, who was my first hiring manager at Nokia, he's still to this day the person that I would go to probably more than anybody else in the world and say, hey, I've got a thought, I've got a problem, I've got an idea. What do you think of it? You know, these people are brilliant when you recognize, you know, how much they contribute to your to your lives. And there are, you know, four or five others in my life that I could say the same. And then the second thing is luck. Yeah, there is an element of luck. But the luck, I think, really does come with you've got to put yourself into the game. You've got to be in it to win it. So there is an element of luck, but luck really comes to those that put themselves out there and and and take a chance on themselves. It's not a lot of luck by just standing still and waiting for things to happen.

Becoming CEO Without A Big Brand

Klara Jagosova 49:29

Transitioning into render, you went from IBM, journal manager, global industries, running multi-billion dollar business into being the CEO of Render Networks now. That is quite a pivot. Again, tell me more about the transition, how it came about, or what made you say yes even to this point, because it seems quite different. And you've been in the role now for over a year. So, how are things going and what are some of the key things? I know you wrote a great blog about it. I'll add the link to the episode notes, but curious to hear more.

Stephen Rose 50:03

It's been great fun. Where did I get lucky? Great board, fantastic board. And you know, I have to say that I've met many other CEOs over the last 12 months who do not have the same experience of their board. And you can really see it in, you know, how they wake up every single day and think, oh god, I've got a board meeting or I'm gonna have to engage with the board, or I'm under, you know, some kind of pressure from the board that makes me feel deeply uncomfortable. I mean, of course you're all you're under pressure. Yeah, you're there to deliver, and you know, the board has an expectation of a of an outcome. But how they engage with you, you know, so that has been brilliant. We've got a great product and you know, we think the market is ripe and you know, whatever else. So timing is everything in life. So the transition itself, there are some things that you know you you you do you don't get the same level of support. You don't have this marketing engine. Probably the biggest thing is you don't have the brand. You know, if you walk in through the door and you've got knocker or you've got IBM behind you, or you can say that, you know, Bell Labs or anything, these comes with, you know, a hundred years of history, enormous, you know, perceived value, massive amounts of money. The brand value carries so much. And I did have an interview, interestingly enough, a few months ago with a gentleman. He asked me at the end of the interview, how do you think this interview has gone? And I said, genuinely, I can't tell if you're good because you work for them or whether it is that you're just actually good. I just couldn't see it, you know. So brand carries you in small organizations, it doesn't. There's a heavy lift and a and a heavy expectation on the team to be able to show the value of the product, make sure that you're getting to market well, and do that off, you know, a lot of individual effort, a lot of teamwork and cooperation, and no brand. That's uh that's a really big challenge, yeah. But it's all possible. We will grow as 300% year to year this year. We will, you know, uh done so uh without putting much more on the stress of the of the PL. Gained a whole bunch of customers, we've moved into a new tier, we've done an acquisition, all inside of 12 months, in fact. Oh, and we raised 20 million. All of those things combined. And I didn't do that by myself. Of course I didn't. Again, it was great teamwork, great cooperation, huge commitment to the cause, etc.

Klara Jagosova 52:14

It does seem like you're applying the lessons seen from military through how that career operating and speed, focus, and intensity now, perhaps more than ever. And I guess the brand name recognition, I'm curious, just genuinely, because you have such an impressive background. I mean, that alone opens the door, right? At some point in time, I think it's about the people and the credibility. And yes, you have to have the right product and expertise in how you communicate. But specifically with the experiences you have had and the success you have helped create and deliver, I'm guessing the opening door is not an issue for you, Steven, personally.

Stephen Rose 52:52

No, but I I think there's a limit to that, right? So, you know, yes, you are right, you'll be able to pick up the phone and you know, you will know people and and because of that, they're kind and generous enough to help you and whatnot. But you quickly realize, and I I didn't even come in with this expectation that, you know, the company's gonna ride on my coattails for the next 24, 36 months. That that would be a disaster. What you have to do is is recognize that there is a role for you to play, you can use that, whatever else, but your role is to get the company off of that problem really, really, really fast. Yeah. So you're putting others into the spotlight, you're making sure that they've got the you know, the breadth, you're not the person that's taking every single analyst or or a press interview. You're ensuring that you're enabling the organization and you're pushing down the decisions as much as you can, which lifts the organization up by definition, yeah. So I think when you put those things into practice, then you start to build a sustainable business. Back to the original point, doing it on the back of my coattails, very, very short lifespan for that kind of decision making.

Klara Jagosova 53:54

Render and what you're building now, it seems to be the right moment, the right mission with everything that's happening in the industry. You need all this fiber for data centers and AI. It seems like we cannot be popping them up quick enough. That's the number one problem. Obviously, people say, well, we can't, because we don't have the fiber and we don't have the power and the electricity. So that's exactly what render seems to unlock to be able to deploy the infrastructure much faster, much more efficiently. You mentioned that about timing. So you certainly seem to now have learned and are smart about taking roles when is the right time in the market. So it seems like the timing is perfect. You have now raised $20 million, as you mentioned, and acquired empower, stretching to utilities. It's super interesting mix, like and render networks and you, Stephen and your team, sit in the middle. What do you see ahead, or how are you operating in this interesting space right now in the moment?

Building Fiber And Grid Faster

Stephen Rose 54:53

You hit the nail on the head. You know, there is this just unprecedented level of demand on utility firms, whether they be telco firms or whether they are electric infrastructure. And same with water, by the way, water will have to, you know, go through the same problem. The water industry is dealing with enormous problems already. Yeah, just trying to keep the taps on, so to speak. Where we come into this is a couple of things. One is you've just got to be able to help take a design and get that design off of a you know theory, yeah, which is a design or an Excel spreadsheet or a commitment and a decision of a banker and an operator to deploy to getting the uh the fiber into the ground or getting the electric infrastructure built. So what do they need to know? Well, they need to understand the real-time state of the build at any one moment in time. That's the most important thing. And then the second thing is they need that to be anchored in verifiable truth, which comes from the field. So that's kind of the two things that we enable at the very, very, you know, sort of uh high level. Yeah. You must understand state in real time and you need it to be verifiable. I think the second thing is that you need to make sure that you do things in such a way that you get the fastest possible outcome. Because in telco and electric infrastructure, speed is everything right now. So if you can make effective decisions and get speed in your decision making, and you can get speed in in closing out the build of a piece of infrastructure, whether it be a fiber to the home or a piece of middle mile or long haul, or whether it be an expansion of the electric grid or a hardening of the electric kid, getting that done at speed is so incumbent because you're, you know, what what those organizations are doing, for every month of delay, they're hitting on the margins of the original business case by percentage points. That's a very expensive uh situation. So actually, I wish I could tie the value of our software to billions of dollars we're enabling, you know, to get into the ground because we'd be trillionaires in or billionaires in no in next to no time. But that's really what we are doing. And uh it's a really exciting time to be able to bring in different types of AI to be able to do that.

Klara Jagosova 56:58

I love that tying the platform to the outcomes that could be an interesting business model for render. I was watching a bunch of your videos, educational videos on YouTube, and obviously come from that industry. So I have lived those pain points myself. It really seems like that render networks is making order and clarity out of that chaos that nobody else knows what to deploy where, what do I have installed? I think every single person who had listened or will listen to this episode and podcast have gone through a situation where you wanted to turn up your fiber at home and you called your provider. It certainly happened to me actually not once, maybe two times because we move a lot, and you call, for example, ATT. I was like, you know, we we don't have a run. I was like, Yeah, my neighbor actually, your RAM is right next to me. I talk to my neighbor and they have your ATT fiber, and you don't actually know that it's there. Can you just pull it? So you have to make four or five phone calls to actually tell them that they actually do have a RAN right next to you, and they can extend it quite easily. So to me, a render actually helps shorten that whole cycle from just how do you deploy it fast with the crews? And there's a bunch of really, really cool videos and case studies you guys have on that to be able to make the crews run more efficiently. And now you are infusing also AI into part of it. I've been reading your wrestleys. Obviously, a bunch of these new fans are taking AI as a force multiplier and enabling the crews to run and operate faster, which is this I hate the world, but it's blue-color jobs, kind of empowering them to do their job much more clearly, much more effectively. How you think about that and to your point, AI is just the technology, where do you deploy it in the right way, in the accurate way, and how are you embedding it into some of the focus areas you and the

AI That Helps Crews And Back Office

Klara Jagosova 58:46

team have now?

Stephen Rose 58:46

It's truly uh exciting. I mean, you know, this this bloody thing here is not particularly sympathetic to the human condition. So, so actually, what you've got to do is you've got to try to think about there is somebody that's, you know, either a supervisor that's doing the reporting or even down at the individual level in the field. What are the conditions that they're working on and what are the constraints that they're working with? Yeah. So there could be all manner of conditions, whether it be um, I need to take a photo of something and I can prove something. I want to be able to use a map and I'm gonna have to red line, but I don't want to do it in such a way that I need a stylus, because you know, who's gonna keep a tiny stylus on an iPad you're in the in the uh in the middle of a 100 degrees in Alabama in summer, right? You know, it just doesn't make any sense. So just trying to understand that, then understanding, you know, what kind of AI could you use to be able to do that, whether it be visual inspection data or whether it be speech to text or whatever it is. So multimodal AI and combinations thereof, and then actually, you know, getting things like log data out of bore machines or whatever it is, there's lots of ways to take lots of data, correlate it, and be able to actually say, has the work been done? And has the work been done well? Yeah. And literally that's really what you're trying to figure out. But get the person that's doing the work to not have a you know a lot of hassle to make that report. So I think that's where AI gets used a lot in the field. And I think in the back office, it's really about helping the back office visualize what's going on in the field through great interfaces and great analysis and then not just leaving it there because in the old days it was like, here's a dashboard. Okay, great. But dashboards are so limiting nowadays. It's can I interrogate the data using different types of AI, different types of prompting that's going to give me maybe surgical understanding of a part of the build that I really want to understand? And more importantly, either is there autonomy in the system that actually decisions can be taken without humans to get effective decision making and speed within agreed tolerances, or can I at least be recommended the next best action on the back of a bunch of insight, full site, and cross-site that you can get from the data? So AI is going to be infused everywhere and in really, really useful ways. And most importantly, not in a way that's threatening to jobs.

Klara Jagosova 1:00:57

I 100% agree with the dashboard that's been my pet peeve. Everybody, oh, we have a dashboard for this. So it's like, well, but it's steady. What if I want to have a different view? What about what if analysis? What about visualization and playing different scenarios? What if I deploy fiber here? How much ROI could I get? So running these analytics of what are the routes and which ones are the best routes to take to optimize your revenue faster. Do I rather go street left or do I go street right? And if I go street right, maybe there's a few homes and businesses. What can my revenue model look like to actually optimize the revenue income to speed deployment ratio? So the costs and ROI measuring. I love that thinking. That makes a lot of sense. It seems like the motto is every asset validated, working, verifiable, being able to actually see the full view of the network, which we don't often have right now. Anything else on the mission focus? What should people know? What do you want to get out to the world?

Stephen Rose 1:01:59

Yeah, and I think the stress on money is only growing now. You know, the win at any cost, you know, mindset that was coming out of the banks and private equity uh a few years back, that's those days are gone. So I think firms have recognized, you know, the digitalization and and you know embracing these types of technologies at the field and in the uh the back office. It's not a nice to have, it's a need to have. What I think is gonna be really exciting next is is where we start to see evolutions of of the way that this data gets visualized. So I think we're gonna see 3D rendering a lot more in a single system. I think you're gonna be doing what-if modeling a lot more as well. So, to your point, and so that'll be an interesting point, see who wins and loses in that space because now one system is gonna be butting up against others, and those systems on the outside are gonna be butting inwards. So yeah, it'd be interesting. But I think we um we're getting it right. We've got a great team. Customers are coming at us in numbers that we can handle, but you know, it's putting uh a lot of uh stress into making sure that the product can do everything that everybody wants all at once. It seems to be like the appetite for for new types of AI is insatiable. Yeah, so we've gone from an industry that was rather slow at adopting to one that now wants to run it at a million miles an hour. So that's quite an interesting twist. That's happened within the last eight months.

Klara Jagosova 1:03:21

Anything you're particularly really optimistic uh about what's ahead?

Stephen Rose 1:03:25

I think the bit that you'll see next is just, you know, because because the electric and the and the telco build, we've been treating them as separate items, they're now concurrent items. We're gonna have to see progressively more and more and more interworking between these network systems. And also, there's a lot to learn that and the way that elcos interoperate with each other that you could actually bring into telco and vice versa. So yeah, I think you're just gonna see a lot of change over the course of the next you know 24, 36 months. But I think the industry is mentally much more prepared for it. So that's probably what gets me excited. It isn't the challenge now of getting them overline into believing what's possible, but it is an implementation and execution issue that we're gonna deal with next. So yeah, be interested to see how that goes.

Klara Jagosova 1:04:10

And getting into that motion of the change, I think that's where you thrive through in your background. Let's do this together and change that mindset and transform it. It's so exciting. So definitely we'll be cheering for you guys. If there's something we have established or had this conversation that you're constantly stepping outside of your comfort zone, reinventing yourself. Anything that you would want to share with somebody who's stuck, how would you encourage others to take the next leap?

Stephen Rose 1:04:37

As many successes as as I've had, I've probably had as many failures. Um, accepting that not everything will go right. Listen. I mean, if I'd gone in my career again and I had to change one thing, probably it would be listen more. That is, you know, two ears, one mouth, right? So um things like that that you wish you you wish you'd done different and better. The way that I would encourage anybody to think about any decision that they're gonna make is really, really deeply, deeply think about what's the worst case scenario around a decision. The very, very worst case, like really deep thinking on it. It's never as bad as you think it is. Ever. And so actually take the risk.

Klara Jagosova 1:05:17

I think there is a study about this, actually. I it was a Daniel Paint about change and the fear of change. And people are terrified of change typically, but more often than not, the ones who actually take the change are eventually much happier with it than the ones when you get stuck in that same mindset or stay with it because you're afraid to take the leap.

Stephen Rose 1:05:36

Yeah, yeah. And there's another element to that, actually, but when I really think about it, it is the trust your gut. I mean, you can use a lot of data to get you to help, you know, make a good indecision and whatnot, but your gut will tell you so much more than you wish to give it credit for. And every time, every single time I've gone against my gut, it's it's been a bad decision.

Klara Jagosova 1:05:58

That is so accurate for me to. And I am not a gut person. Like I literally use spreadsheets to make decisions, even about jobs. And I've learned the highway. Like I try to create criteria and calculate objectives. And I find especially the most important decisions in life are never a head decision. You have to figure out how to tap into your gut. And I still struggle with it actually nowadays, something I've been learning for over 40 years. Do you have any tips, Steven, how to tap into your gut, or do you have a specific process you go through?

Stephen Rose 1:06:28

No, you just feel it. You just feel it. And it's amazing. I mean, I I wish I could put more science to it. But I can tell you now that the times I was set there, and I said, Yeah, just not sure about this. You know, I'm not really, you know, whatever it is, you know, there's a level of uncertainty. And then you take that decision and you go with it. And that's not taking a risk, that's being reckless. Yeah? You need to be honest with yourself about whether you're being risky and is it worth it, or whether you're being reckless. And there's a fine line between those two things. You'll feel it. It's just whether you choose to acknowledge it.

Klara Jagosova 1:07:02

Does it typically come for you in terms of disconnecting or recharging? Do you create the space to reflect and check in with your gut? I know you mentioned your first outlet outside of your intensity and focus and work is music. Do you have special tunes?

Stephen Rose 1:07:17

Yeah, there are actually. If I want to uh really think deeply and um get away from everything, I get in the car and I put classical music on. And when I do that, that just provides the space. Driving for me is where I get loads and loads of loads of time. Aeroplanes as well. I mean, I'll do 21 hours to uh Australia uh from New York and I won't watch a single movie. I just use that time to think and think deeply.

Klara Jagosova 1:07:44

So classical music, anything specific, Stephen, or your favorite tunes you suggest?

Stephen Rose 1:07:49

There is one piece of classical music. If I only had to listen to one piece of classical music for the rest of my life, it would be Carl Jenkins, The Armed Man, A Mass for Peace. It is absolutely wonderful.

Klara Jagosova 1:08:01

I'll look it up, I'll add the link to the notes if I can find it somewhere on YouTube or for people to easily tune in. Anything else on disconnecting? How easy it is for you to disconnect and anything that gets you into that state of mind.

Stephen Rose 1:08:15

Yeah, I mean the hills, uh, when I used to do the mountaineering and I still love to hike, I'd do it by myself typically. And I used to do all the big climbs by myself. I didn't want to be bothered by anybody. Um, and if I was gonna peg it, uh then at least I'd have done it without anybody else having to watch it. It's a brilliant place because there's just you and your head and nothing else to distract you, you know. And when you are going up a really, really tough mountain and you've just got to tell yourself 10,000 times, just keep going, just keep going, your mind drifts and it wanders into places, you know. So uh that sort of solitude, yeah. I think solitude really matters. And and you've got to be, you know, sort of comfortable with being by yourself. And I I I am, I I really enjoy that solitude. Of course, you know, I have lots of people around me, but if I want to think, that's the place to do it.

Klara Jagosova 1:09:03

I love that, I agree. And especially once you get it at three to four thousand meters, no matter how trained you are, the breathing is really hard. So every step you take, you just have to trust that that you will be able to make one more step after. Yeah, and there is this interesting space between tiredness and uh just faith almost. Yeah, I'm I'm looking forward to planning my hike. I know you have a couple of years ahead now in August and September. So curious to see how you enjoy them and what new clarity you're able to gain from it.

Stephen Rose 1:09:37

Or new injuries, let's see.

Klara Jagosova 1:09:40

Maybe both. Probably they're both. I have never gone back from a hike where I didn't get injured. It's a combination they tend to go together. So, last few closing questions.

Change Leadership, Reskilling, And Trusting Gut

Klara Jagosova 1:09:51

Anyone who's listening, operators, builders, investors, anybody's navigating bigger transitions or trying to deploy more fiber in the telco, what would you suggest people to be doing more of or less stuff?

Stephen Rose 1:10:03

You know, this digitalization journey is a chance, but it comes with massive change leadership expectation. I think if I was an operator today and I wanted to invest in any kind of skills development that I knew was going to make a big difference, I'd be investing tons of money into change leadership. Getting organizations ready to embrace AI ways of working, AI-centric ways of working, just accepting that that is the norm. We shouldn't even be talking about AI in the way that we do too today, a year from now. But it would almost be silly to say, or it should be silly, to ask the question, you know, are you an AI-first firm? Of course you should be. Yeah? Because if you're not, you're definitely going to get left behind. But to be an AI-first company, to really have it at the culture level, embedded in everyday ways of working, realizing that that innovative way of working can come from anywhere in the organization now. Yeah, there'll be people that adopted the technology faster than others in the organization and using them as champions, as part of your change leadership curve, as part of your communication curve. That's where I would be putting uh investment. I see still too many firms considering it as a bolt-on. And as soon as you think it's a bolt-on, you're never going to be able to operate as quickly as everybody else does.

Klara Jagosova 1:11:18

At IBM, you reskilled 40% of your headcount. I mean, that's such a big achievement, especially in the anybody who comes from the big organization. I mean, those to me are often the hardest to pivot and transition. Any tips from there?

Stephen Rose 1:11:32

This 40% refresh that we did was very much connected to a type of problem. And we had very, very honest, sincere discussions with each of the employees in the team to say, this is what we're doing, and we either think you're ready or we don't think you're ready for this. And then there was a question about if you weren't ready, then the second question was, okay, to what extent do we think you're going to be able to close the gap? And then where we couldn't close the gap, it wasn't like they were fired. We were, you know, we were able to facilitate them into the job. But we had a very, very honest, transparent discussion that, you know, where we don't think you're ready, we're just going to tell you. Yeah. That process went through very, very smoothly because the people that we had to move on into new roles because, you know, the mission that the team had now been given, which was quite different from, you know, the previous leaders in the role, people saw that. So you know, just that honest discussion went so much further than treading through and, you know, picking away and picking them up in performance reviews that happen once a year and then giving them a bad rating. And yeah, what an awful way to get a message to somebody that you could just say, hey, look, you're a great guy, but just not for this mission, or you're a great person. You're, you know, just not for this mission. Let's figure it out together. That's where we dealt with that. And that's why we got it done really quickly.

Klara Jagosova 1:12:51

I love that building trust through just transparent, candid conversation and also leading courageously, just let everybody know you need to make that change. Like this is the reality. Yeah.

Stephen Rose 1:13:02

Yeah.

Klara Jagosova 1:13:02

On the reality, I do want to put you on a spot, Steven, because you shared one story with me that was fantastic about Giorgio Armani. I need that story, Stephen.

Stephen Rose 1:13:16

Oh God. Yeah. Uh yeah. So yeah, one of my highlights of my career as the head receptionist for Giorgio Armani on 17th Street and Broadway in whenever it was, a long, long, long time ago. You know, when I did that interview. Of course, I'd never been a receptionist before. And they said to me, you know, why are you good for this job? And I said, Good afternoon, Giorgio Armani. And they're, yeah, you've got the job. Sprickest interview maybe I'd ever had. Yeah.

Klara Jagosova 1:13:44

So just perform. Show it.

Stephen Rose 1:13:47

Yeah, exactly. I would say that was the arrogance of a 19 or 20 years old or whatever I was at the time. And not a lot to lose. Yeah. Quick interview, good interview. Great fun. Great experience, actually, as well.

Klara Jagosova 1:13:59

I feel like that's how you have been continuing to play in your life with taking the right steps, the right risks, the right courage. Because often, if we default to just living with the status quo and giving up to the fear, life will be for sure at least much more boring.

How To Connect And Closing

Klara Jagosova 1:14:15

Steven, it's been a privilege to have you. I know you're quite active on LinkedIn, so with your permission, I'll add your LinkedIn profile to the episode notes so people can find you. And you have a bunch more articles I suggest people to read and dive in. They have been really insightful. So look forward to continuing that. Any other way to keep up with you, get in touch?

Stephen Rose 1:14:35

Yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best way. Otherwise, it's stephen.rose at renderneworks.com.

Klara Jagosova 1:14:40

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Stephen. I'll uh keep cheering for you and the team and hope to meet at somewhere in the world soon.

Stephen Rose 1:14:47

I'm sure we will. Alright, take care. Thanks, Clara.

Klara Jagosova 1:14:51

Thank you for tuning in to Grand Slam Journey. Subscribe, share, and join us for the next conversation. Let's go.