Insights

What is your Back Story?

I’ve been drawn to science and technology for as long as I can remember. My family celebrated the good that technology could do. My father was an industrial engineer, his brother a nuclear engineer, and both were the first on that side of the family to attend college. I grew up on classic science fiction at a time when the U.S. felt optimistic about science and tech. As a kid I built circuits from hobbyist magazines and taught myself to code on a school timeshare computer.

Naturally, I headed to engineering school. Freshman year blunted the joy of electronics and computers, so I switched majors. Mechanical engineering used the same math but with a learn-by-doing ethos and professors who reignited my curiosity. Summer jobs in labs working on nuclear fusion and space plasma physics gave me my first real taste of building instruments. One day at a neighborhood hardware store, the owner asked me what I was studying. When I told him, he smiled and replied, “bless you!” That was one of several epiphanies that led me to want to create things that make real and positive difference.

After graduation, I became a process engineer in a Silicon Valley electronics factory, applying statistical methods to find and fix problems on the line. That early blend of hands-on engineering, data-driven problem solving, mission focus, and multidisciplinary work have shaped everything I’ve done since. 

Today my firm helps executives create the strategy and conditions for rapid, high value product delivery. We base that on approaches I’ve developed as a leader and an engineer across a range of company sizes and markets. My most recent corporate role was as the VP and General Manager of the software business at Agilent Technologies, where we had a large global team that gave me the chance to develop leadership approaches that I think will be relevant to your readers.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

This is the story of how an earthquake saved the most important product you’ve never heard of.

In the late 1980s I was on a team building a cutting-edge electronic instrument. We were spread across two sites about a half-hour apart. We had email and landlines, but dispersed development was unusual then—and hardware work demands frequent, hands-on testing—so distance made everything harder. The Palo Alto site housed HP Labs, where the physicists leading the program spent most of their time. I sat in the Santa Clara division that would ultimately market the product. We tried to bridge the gap with weekly face time at Labs, but progress was slow, the team never fully gelled, and an “us versus them” vibe persisted.

On October 17, 1989, the magnitude-6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake changed everything. I was at Labs that day. Sprinklers burst and drenched sensitive equipment and papers; internal structures slammed together and bent the building’s steel frame. After a brief closure, the building was condemned. The Labs physicists moved into our pen in Santa Clara—and overnight we became one team in one place.

Our rate of progress improved immediately. Instead of emailing or waiting days for meetings, we took a few steps to hash out problems. All the hardware prototypes sat in a central area, so someone was always running a test, and everyone could see progress in real time. Within a few months, we had a working prototype. We went on to release the HP5071a—still in production over 30 years later as the Microchip 5071b—a frequency standard essential to timekeeping, navigation, and communications. I don’t think it would have happened on any reasonable timeline without the quake forcing us to work shoulder-to-shoulder. When you check the time, when your plane lands under GPS control, or when you use high-speed internet, think of the earthquake that helped make it possible.

What was the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? What did you learn from that?

Early in my career I was determined to make a mark. I worked in a factory that assembled printed circuit boards for early personal computers. Machines placed most components; skilled operators and technicians kept everything humming. As a process engineer, my job was to boost productivity by improving quality and reducing downtime.

One morning I marched up to the lead technician and launched into a post-mortem about a downtime incident. He listened, then said, “Good morning, John—how are you today? How is your family doing?” I was gobsmacked. My first feeling was confusion at being blocked.

It took a while for the lesson to land. I was so focused on getting things done that I’d neglected to see the people I depended on as people. After that, I made a point of getting to know my colleagues and treating them as people first. It helped me to be effective and more human. I’m grateful to Rich G. for delivering that lesson with a simple greeting.

What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees to thrive and avoid burnout?

Start with the basics: people must feel respected and safe—physically and emotionally. That’s the minimum condition.

To prevent burnout, set reasonable boundaries for life outside work—and model them. Codify norms so employees trust that their careers won’t suffer for honoring those boundaries. People also need purpose: a sense that their work matters beyond a paycheck. Purpose fuels resilience and staying power. And purposeful people need some autonomy: motivation fades when nothing is within their own initiative. Employees share responsibility for these conditions, but leaders set the tone.

Leaders can go further by investing in people as individuals and as a team. Be curious about each person’s life and career goals and help them grow in those directions. As a team leader, model the basics: show up on time, communicate respectfully and directly, serve the group before yourself, run effective meetings, and be fully present. Whether you’re in a room or on video, if you’re distracted during a meeting, you’re signaling that the interruptions matter more than the interaction. It will be noticed. The clearest signal of respect is undivided attention.

Finally, treat your team’s capacity like an operating budget—it’s finite. Every new addition must be balanced by delaying something else. Planning and direction changes are costly. Planning consumes your most experienced people. Minimize “planning waste”: sessions that go nowhere, long-range roadmaps destined to be discarded in a quarter, and similar churn. Change course only at well-defined times, and hands off the wheel the rest of the time. Otherwise it burns time, breeds disengagement, and accelerates burnout.

Can you articulate the five main challenges regarding managing a remote team?

Workday overlap 

Distributed teams need enough shared hours to collaborate in real time. Without overlap, people default to low-urgency channels like email or chat, which slows problem-solving and encourages handoffs over teamwork. Our division at Agilent spanned roughly eight sites across India, Australia, the U.S., and Europe. No single person could reasonably cover all time zones, so we deliberately increased overlap, spread the load, and invested in periodic travel so people could work—and break bread—together.

Becoming a team

When every interaction is scheduled, it’s harder to build the trust that comes from knowing each other as people. Example: I worked with a company split between Australia and California. People in each location trusted each other but viewed the other location with suspicion. It took deliberate leadership, lots of conversations, and in-person visits to build the relationships that ultimately made the whole team work better.

Developing spontaneous interaction

Remote tools kept us productive during the pandemic but at the cost of missing the serendipitous interactions that happen at the office. This is especially tough on new hires who lack relationships and may not know when to ask for help. Beginning with the pandemic we tried to recreate “hallway time”: virtual coffees and celebrations (sometimes with mailed snacks), improv exercises to improve teamwork, open “office hours” where leaders were on a drop-in call each week, and a mantra—“pick up the phone”—to favor live conversation over text. Offices can still add unique value here, but most companies haven’t redesigned them for what they do better than a home office.

Effective meetings

Effective meetings are even more critical with remote teams than they are when everyone is in a room together. This is especially true when some people are in the office and others are not. Before the pandemic I had staff meetings where some people would phone in, others were in the room, and still others used a video system. Those who were on the phone had no way to know when to speak and often could not hear well. Even those on video participated less than those in the room. We decided that if anyone could not appear in person, we would do the meeting fully on video with one camera and mic per person. It’s way too easy for people to be distracted and not fully engage with group calls when they are remote, and it is hard to read the cues that we see naturally in person. It takes extra thought and commitment to make every meeting matter enough to be worthy of people’s full engagement. 

Hiring, performance, and succession at a distance

Interviewing is imperfect even in person, and international hiring adds legal and logistical complexity. For smaller companies, contractors or intermediaries can be simpler. Example: We learned that timely feedback and truly knowing your people take extra effort when calendars are packed with calls—so we tightened feedback loops and were intentional about regular one-on-ones to keep performance, development, and succession moving.