[Music] okay welcome to McLean Forrester's Tech Tea, the podcast that you have to listen to. It's about the latest emerging Technologies and things you just want to know. I'm Larry McLean and you are, and I'm Heather McLean, and we are with McLean Forrester LLC.
Heather, what's what's your background what qualifies you what makes you bonafide to be here? I don't know, we'll let the listeners figure that out for themselves, but I have spent many years in Tech, I'm retired Air Force officer and have a background in logistics; have spent the last 10 or 11 years in technology building amazing technologies for many many Fortune 500 companies probably some things that you may have used on your phone or on the web. I don't know I just think it'd be great to sit and chat about that with with Larry and I think I think we have a lot of stories to tell. Well we always have stories. What do you think is the blend between working for federal government and or commercial because there's a lot of advancements in the commercial sector so those are bringing in lots of advanced technologies, lots of advanced processes, that potentially may not exist in the federal space. Would you agree with that? Totally, I mean, one of the reasons we wanted to start this company, my business partner Rose Nyte and I, was because we had this extensive background in commercial Tech and really felt like we could build that out and bring a lot of value to a lot of customers in the commercial world, but also with our military background and our familiarity with the Department of Defense, we really felt like we could bring that Tech to the government. And you know, the government doesn't always get the latest and greatest, but I think that there are many ways that we can do that we'll delve into some of that in the future podcasts. I'm sure. My background, so Larry McLean, I started in the Air Force many many years ago. I was a communication officer I ran a couple of global networks,
just a lot of interesting things places people anything that a military career kind of affords anyone. The training, the leadership training, you know, not only the technology training but also the leadership training you get in the military is fantastic and in some ways I would call it unparalleled. At every stage in your career you get, this is the Milestone you need to hit, this is the training you need, we need to prepare you for the next level. So at the end of my Air Force career, I did 27 and a half years of active duty in the Air Force, then retired from the Air Force and started for the Department of Defense and was a Department of Defense civilian up until about a month ago. Again very same situation you continue to move around in an organization you continue to get additional training certifications. Through my
last employer it was wonderful, they wanted me to do IT services, so I became an ITIL expert. They wanted me to lead the data management team, I went and was able to get a certified data management professional certification. And then lastly emerging Technologies, I received a certificate from MIT for digital transformation. Again every milestone you hit there's additional training, more tools. As a former boss said, more tools in your toolbox, and I love that phrase because that's what it is. As your career grows you shouldn't stop putting tools in your toolbox
So that's me,. The company, McLean Forester, you touched on that you and Rose. What what was really the catalyst for you in your mind, of I think I can do this, I I believe that I have a company idea that could bring value. That's a that's a great story I'm happy to share that. I would say this goes back to 2023 2022 and 2023 when Rose and I were both leading, we are both leading a 400 person software development organization within a large global IT company, and we started to go down a path, the organization did, where we were looking at layoffs and we went through a pretty tumultuous year. It was highly stressful, saw a lot of good people leave the organization,
and I think we started to to say to ourselves we can do this. We can do this better. and really by emphasizing our focus on taking care of people and delivering value to customers. And so one Saturday I went to Rose's house and we registered our LLC and then it was a reality. So I think our our desire to take care of the people that work on our teams, to build a great working environment, we're an all virtual company so people can work from wherever they're comfortable, and really doing things on, you know, the leading edge of tech. We didn't always get to do that in
our previous role but now we really want to aim for those projects that are going to be exciting and they're going to help us learn new things. And, you know, professional growth and continuous learning are some of our core concepts that we hold very dear, so it was born, and then shortly after, I left the company I was working for and since then I've been working at McLean Forrester full-time. And I really think we're going somewhere. It's been so exciting, I can't even imagine going back. There's this great podcast that I listen to called the corporate escapee by this gentleman, Brett Trainor, who is also another corporate escape, and it's really targeted more towards Gen Xm towards my generation and people who are sort of disillusioned with corporate life and want to do their own thing. And so it's been great to know that there's a community of people
out there that are going through the same thing, that are facing the same challenges, and we can lean on each other you know in fact we we got some information about how to run a podcast through that group so it's it's wonderful to know that other people are tackling these things and and also feeling the same way about corporate life. I will not go back. Let's go back for second, you mentioned you had to do a number of layoffs and I recall when you were having to do that, that was a very stressful and and troublesome time for you in the organization because you knew you had good people and due to, and I and I'll let you kind of jump in on the story, but I remember at the time you talked about how the people that were that you had to let go was only about the lack of work and so quite often kind of had no reflection on the person's abilities or their value to the organization. And I think that was one of the things where you found that most frustrating because it's one thing to cull the herd as they say, people are just not the right fit for them, you know maybe another fit would be fantastic for them, but in this particular role it wasn't a good fit for them but that wasn't the case in all the the scenarios that you had that you had to have that heart-to-heart conversation with someone that you knew that they were incredibly valuable even in the role that they were filling you just didn't have, you had to do cutbacks, so I'm I'm telling your story for you I guess, but what was that, what did that feel like? I mean it's it's never easy to let somebody go, and I think it's even harder when you want to keep them when they're providing value so that's just one example of the ways that we thought we could handle things better, the ways that we thought we know how to run a company we've done this before basically at a pretty big scale, and we knew we could we could do things the way we really felt they needed to be done. What do you think, if you were to try to sum up, what is the vision for your company that obviously that was a cornerstone piece of it but what really is the vision of your company? Our vision is to bring technology to organizations that need it, so we want to be focused on delivering value; we want to be focused on emerging technology, things that are exciting and fun and new and along the way build a wonderful team of great people who you know we enjoy working with and create an environment where those people want to work with us. It's actually a good time, we have a huge network of people ready to come work for us, and so we're, as you know, we're working on our go to market strategy, we're working on sales, and you know I'm just so excited to bring all these fantastic folks onto our team as soon as we can. That to me is exciting because I know we got people ready to go who are, who believe in us and who are ready to tackle some of these cool, cool amazing problems. Yeah I think we'll touch on that
in a minute about emerging tech, because that's an exciting area for me as well. I share the value, I mean, I share the vision with you. It's to go do new things. In my entire life it's just been set up with understanding who I am and and what motivates me and what always motivates me is how can I make things better which fit very well in my air force career because they always say that. That you have a limited time at each location and you need to leave things better than you found it, and so my whole career has been striving to make things better. I I thrive on the challenge. I thrive on being able to make positive change so that vision of yours, of getting out there and helping companies and organizations get better. We're in the middle
of the fourth Industrial Revolution with data and AI and all the things that you're reading about, but not necessarily, people don't necessarily have a grasp of well how does this affect me how does this affect my company how does this affect the people that I work with what are the cause and effects of these great emerging technologies that are coming out and I think that's where the McLean Forrester niche really settles in. I understand the technology I understand the business let me help you bridge the two and and break it down for you and help start to start that journey. What are your values? We've got, I'll talk about our core values for our company. And you probably could guess what they are based on maybe some of our talk already, but innovation, trust, collaboration, and service. You know, you and I are retired military so service is a big part of who we are and what drives us, and so that also needs to drive our company. And then things
like collaboration, how we work together, how we collaborate with customers, full transparency, open communication, you know, just telling the news as soon as we know it. Those are things that we value that you can expect from us. And then you know that all leads to building trust. I feel like trust is this magical, this magical circle of, it's this magical circle that you build with a customer. So you you start to build trust in a face-to-face kickoff we love to do that if we can because there's just nothing like being face to face with somebody especially when you meet them, right. You start building that trust and then when you start delivering for that customer
that trust builds and it and it feeds this circle and then you deliver again and the trust builds, And so the idea is you want to keep building that trust and delivering how and when you say you're going to deliver and then and then when you do hit those hiccups in a project, because it's inevitable, right, nothing goes perfectly, there's always something you couldn't have planned for. But when you do get to that point, you've got the the relationship, and you've got that trust established, and it it just makes it so much easier because they're trusting that you're being honest about what's happened and what we're going to do about it and you're trusting that that they have faith that you can, you know, we can get over this challenge whatever it is. So, yeah, those are... Go ahead, no I think that's, I think that's really really important because I've dealt with, especially being in government service, I've dealt with a lot of contracts over over my career and you get a vibe from each different contractor. And one may be, hey I'm your partner, I'm here to
work with you, if there are tough discussions and tough talks to have we'll have those talks, right, if if it comes down to negotiating on cost and things like that you do that, but you kind of feel like they're still acting in your best interest. Whereas I've run into some other contractors that you can tell that money is their driver and and they don't really necessarily care about establishing trust with you and therefore now you're skeptical at every milestone. Building that trust is immense because it comes back to do we have a relationship a mutual trust relationship, or are you just in this for you, right, and and so I think that trust is immense in any work that we do. What what is your role, I know what your role is, but tell everybody else what your role is right. Well I think right now, as many founders, I'm wearing wearing many hats, but primarily my
hat is the chief executive officer, right, I'm also the CFO and a number of other things, but you know right now I'm responsible for running the company. We've got some strategic plans we've got in place, and so right now I'm also as you know engaging with customers, running our, running our projects you know because we're new and there's nothing wrong with being new but I do long for a time where I can start handing off some of these roles to you know excellent people who want to come work for us and start building our business and building up our team. I know, we, I know we've joked in the past it comes down to as a new company especially when you're trying to operate in in contracts in federal space, state, you know, state governments they always ask about your past performance and that's a bit of a struggle and it's a very reasonable question to ask of a company what's your past performance because I want to know again if I can establish that trust with you based upon how you perform for others but it's a challenge for a new business especially one that brings in the expertise that you and Rose have. I've kind of likened it to the past of of SKG, right, uh Spielberg, cats and cats and Bal uh Katsenberg and Geffin, when they formed a company what was their past performance as SKG. Oh they had zero past performance but you knew they were
going to be successful right, and I kind of liken you and Rose to that kind of same mentality that you're bringing immense talent, experience, a longevity being able to see what's what's right and what's not right, and so therefore it's a high level of confidence and I think given the opportunity on a few contracts a few opportunities working with with others to help build a what do they call it co-creation of value I think that's going to shine and and yeah I'm excited for it me too well. So conversely back to the what do you do question I think it'd be great Larry if you could tell our audience what your role is. Well you know there's always that phrase you're not the boss of me but in this particular case you are, so I'm the chief growth officer. I have had interest obviously not because of personal gain but it really, this excites me, like I said a few minutes ago my career has been, can I go make a difference, and I see this as a great opportunity to go make a difference. Throughout a long career I've made a lot of connections, people that I want to help it's not ,oh can I go sell something to someone, it's really on the lines of where's the fit. As we have discovered technologies, emerging technologies that will just blow your mind, who can I help with this? And it's very selective,, it's not like, it's a sheet that I'm going to just broadcast out in a mass email, oh come see this. It is very targeted. Who can, who can we go help.
Where do I recall in conversation where there's a problem set that I think we could help with, so that's really what I'm trying to do is find the square pegs and put them in the square holes, and bring value to people. Yeah I'm so excited to have you on board. It's one it's great to work with my spouse because, we haven't worked together in many years and I think that's going to be fun. You know because you're the CEO that's why it's fun for you, hopefully we'll still be married after this adventure, right? But we've had we've had some pretty good years, but also because of what what you bring to the table and, I've mentioned this to you before, but you constantly amaze me with when we're in a conversation with potential customer or a partner, and I forget sometimes how knowledgeable you are and how savvy you can be in those conversations. So it's exciting for me to have such a great partner a thank you. And ditto, but you know it comes back to experience and they say experiences having made those mistakes once before and I made a lot of mistakes so therefore you know I feel like I'm experienced now. I'm sure experienced in making mistakes too. You had this question that I liked, is how did you become the leader you are today? That's that's a very, that's a very packed up kind of. I love this question yeah, I can't wait to ask some of our
guests this question because I think we're going to learn a lot. For me I really have to go back to my parents because they really gave me a good set of values and a great foundation for what what is right and how you know how to behave and how to interact with others and how to be a good person, so it kind of starts way back there for me. But then I also I have to give the Air Force a ton of credit because, I may have had some natural leadership skills, I don't know, but they sure helped me hone them. As you mentioned earlier like lots of training at every every step of the way; when you're ready for a promotion you have already been trained on how to how to be at that next level, and I did not see that in the corporate world for the most part. That's really disheartening because we got such great training and education and guidance and mentorship in the military so I learned a lot. And then you know my time in the commercial world was invaluable,
you know, I started out managing a single project a single software development agile team project, and it was very new to me and I just I just fell in love with it. And then you know then I started running a practice of delivery leadership, and then I went from there to being a senior director and managing the whole organization with a a group of peers. And the things I've learned, the things that those other leaders taught me, I can honestly say I'm totally ready for this job. Now that doesn't mean I'm not going to have challenges but I feel like I've learned the right things that will help me conquer those challenges. And we won't name drop but I've always been kind of amazed especially being in the civil sector seeing you in the commercial sector go out to headquarters of companies, meet people who have established the company, some of the great you know commercial leaders in our country that people would be, wow I didn't realize you'd met them or worked with them, quite amazing leaders who have built companies and built capabilities. For me, my answer to that is very very similar kind of felt like you were stealing my thunder there, you know my parents, I had a great dynamic of my parents. You know, my mother was the very caring one great
great connectivity, again comes back to do the right thing. My dad who was a a grocery store manager and I worked in the grocery store and you know there's kind of this opinion of us the boss's son and therefore you know he's probably going to get special treatment. I quite often felt like it was the opposite. If there were three of us standing around goofing off he would come by and chastise me to get his message out, and I understood why. I didn't have a problem with it,, but there was one little quick story I'll tell where I was, it was a, it was a really defining moment of there's a right way to do things. I was sweeping the floor with a big push broom and he, he stops me and says I'm doing it wrong, and I'm thinking to myself what the heck, I'm sweeping the floor how can I be sweeping the floor wrong? And he showed, me took the the time to show me, says you know you push the, you push the broom forward you kind of tap it to get all the dirt out so you're not bringing the dirt back over that same area, and I had to admit at the time reluctantly as a teen, right, I know everything, I had the realization, I guess I didn't know everything and there really is a right way to sweep the floor with a big push broom. And that was kind
of a defining moment that he was reinforcing in me. If you're going to do something do it right if you're going to do something, do it to the best of your abilities, and I would, I won't go into any more of the kind of Air Force things, but I had some great supervisors. I had some great bosses. My first couple of bosses in the Air Force really set the tone, it was almost like we had a
competition to see who got there first in the morning and who was the last to leave at at the day at the end of day and there was a right way to do things. So I'm very thankful I had leaders like that to show me the right way. Yeah you know I think that scenario with you and your dad, I feel like we've been through that with our kids many many times, and I hope, I hope in 20 years they're telling people how they they learned a good lesson out of that because their story, yeah, so our listeners, we have four, four daughters age 18 to 22, and two sons, two sons. The four girls are all in school right now, all in college, and you know, if you've, if you've been a parent or you've known a parent, you can know, it can be stressful, so I can't wait to hear the lessons that we accidentally may have instilled in them over the years. So the nature of the podcast, right, the nature of the podcast is going to be about emerging technologies, right emerging technologies, and leaders who are immersed in some of these technologies and some of the cornerstone elements of what is this fourth Industrial Revolution. Some of the emerging tech areas that you're focused on or that we're focused on. I mean AI, number one AI, it is, I've never seen anything
like it in my lifetime, and I honestly could say, I'm wasn't sure we would, but now I think the next 10 years are going to be some of the most exciting, and I'm so excited that we get to live through this and we get to be a part of it. So definitely AI. You know there's so much that can be done there that you couldn't do a few years ago. Other emerging Tech I mean just like anything with the cloud is emerging and then especially with the government, the cloud, AI, those are great areas that we're hopefully going to be able to explore. I don't know, what would you add to that, you actually have better background in this than I do. I guess the challenge you know when people say AI as a general term I get ruffled a little bit only because there are so many capabilities of a that. AI exists in that spectrum whereas but it's still a very valid and accurate term that's, oh we want to do AI, well what kind of AI, right, there's so many different flavors now that I find it incredibly interesting of I can go down this path, I can go down that path, I can go this path over here, does it help me make better decisions, can I write software code, can I now learn about all things across the internet from the last 20 years. You know generative AI has
been a game changer. Generative AI is basically AI that can generate new thought new, new responses versus just converging current existing data it actually thinks through and can provide new answers all of these things can be applied in so many different market segments, so many different capability areas that it's like you like you said, I think this is incredibly exciting, and the next 10 years are going to just explode in so many ways of advancement of capabilities for organizations. The flip side to that is if there are organizations out there who aren't looking at AI, afraid of AI, can't trust AI, they're going to be the ones you know in a parade sitting on the curb eating their popcorn watching the parade go by because it comes back to, you better jump aboard because your competitors are and that's probably the compelling message that we have to a lot of organizations that says I'm not really sure about this AI thing. Well you better be right. Well that's funny I just posted about that on LinkedIn yesterday, just about, you know, are you are you going to be behind if you're not really in this area yet, and I think this is where we can help people especially if you don't know what you want to build. right? We are skilled at
eliciting through a collaborative conversation the things that we could build for you or with you that will bring high value right give you high return on investment because we don't want to just go build something to build something we want to bring value through what tech we build. So we know this works best when we get in a room and we collaborate. We bring out the whiteboards and we can do this virtually as well but you know we get out the old sticky notes we brainstorm and we come up with those those projects that are going to bring you value, those things where you say, well if I just could do this it would be a game changer for our business. And then the tech comes after. You've got to start with what what you're building and why what value is that going to bring and then you can build the tech to get to that end. The problem is never the tech, with the customer, that's never the hard part. The harder part is coming to understand what
you're going to build, having everybody on board with that, and moving in that direction and making sure it's something that's going to bring value and that has leadership support at the top level. That was an incredible moment that you're saying all that because it comes back to, you hear organizations saying, well I probably need to go get into this AI thing, right, well it's not like I'm going to go order a gallon of AI or or a 10 pound box of AI and all my problems are solved, It really comes back to and and you just described it well is how do I look at my business processes, my operational processes, where am I trying to make decisions that I need lots of information and sometimes the humans can't process that much information to make the best decision. You're always going to make the decision you just find out later that it wasn't a good decision and so therefore the more information the streamlining, the AI augmented kind of capabilities, starts with that business process, my pain points, what can I do differently. You get a new realm of the possible when you start to bring in some of these technologies you know and throughout history it's kind of been the same, well I would do things a certain way and then all of a sudden I find this technology that's now going to make my life easier. Think of the smartphone, right. Right, we we never sat down and came up with all the requirements for a smartphone, other people did, and it was crowdsourced and they're new apps and you realize now I can change my life behavior because I now have this app and I can do it this way instead of the manual way that I used to do things, right. And that's one of the reasons that sort of our tagline, you'll see it on our website, is we build lifechanging technology. I truly believe that because I've done it you know. I've
built life-changing technology for customers. Technology that saved a customer's business. Technology that helped them scale and grow, and so that's what we want to be doing for our customers. Building technology yeah building technology that changes their lives, yeah, that's cool. The podcast. Yeah, talk about tea, you came up with the name Tech Tea. You know having teens and early 20s and early 30s children it's always the the latest generation's acronyms for things, right, their taxonomy. Talk to me about tech tea. Right so maybe it was a year or two ago,
this phrase kept coming out of our daughter's mouths, you know, what's the tea, tell me the tea, and what that means is like what's the gossip, what's the news, tell me the sort of juicy bits of information that we all love to have, and so I thought this one might be a good name for our podcast because it's about, it's the tea about tech. We're going to talk about the latest juiciest things and you know that's really where it came from. And you liked the name and so here we are, we're we're Tech Tea with McLean Forrester. Tech Tea I love it. For all all the people of this color hair generation, you go, what?So now they
know. Now they know. We're starting on day one episode, and we're already providing education. So you can talk to your grandchildren, your children, etc. about the Tea, right, because now you know what it is. What are some of the upcoming topics that we have. Oh yeah, good question.
I think we're going to focus on some of our, some of the capabilities that we're honing in on, one of them is AI assisted portfolio management. So that's where we can look at your applications, we have some AI, very cool AI tools, that will help us do that in a really easy quick way and help organizations make like five R determinations around their applications. So do I retire this application, explain the five Rs. Retire rehost rearchitect rebuild, so you're, you're look, taking a look at all the applications you have and you're trying to figure out which ones do I move to the cloud which ones should I modernize because they'll get me the highest ROI. So organizations are facing this problem right now because because these systems that they're that they're using have been around a long time and it's hard to make decisions because up until now it was really hard to get great data about those decisions. So anyway I'm getting into the weeds, but that's an upcoming
episode. I know you really want to talk about intelligent applications which is kind of a new, a new concept. We're going to talk about data you know and you really can't do AI well without a good data foundation, and I know this is your sweet spot Larry so I'm excited for you to talk about that. I know we're going to share some things about agile software development, agile
software delivery in general, that's my sweet spot so I'm going to talk a little bit about that in a future episode. What are the things you're looking forward to talking about? I think everything you just said is what I'm looking forward to because it comes down to there are a lot of technologies, a lot of capabilities, that are out there that are still kind of foreign to people, and I think trying to do our best through this podcast to make them tangible, give good use cases, give good examples of how would this work. When as an example you just said intelligent apps, right, what is an intelligent application right? I'm excited when we get to that episode to talk about here's what it would look like, here's some examples that you have today. Augmented connected workforce, oh that's interesting, yeah that's an upcoming one. Augmented connected workforce where you really have this digital assist and a digital mentor that's going to be. I love
that topic because I think that is so universal across a lot of different market segments that have high turnover, can't afford to have a true mentor you know side by side with a new employee, let's accelerate their education. You know we talked in this podcast about how in the military you get all this education this knowledge base passed to you. A lot of organizations can't afford to do that. A lot, a lot of organizations don't have the structure for that to have a digital
assistant that can do a lot of that for you. Again it just accelerates growth so a lot of different areas. I'm, I'm with you, I'm excited about the different, different things and then in each episode we'll also kind of talk about current events, technology trends that are happening at the time. You know some of these are they're all you know technology trends but you know what's
kind of come out in the last few weeks or whatever that are of note that relate back to emerging technology and the things that we're talking about so right. And we're gonna have, we have a good lineup of guests also which I'm excited because we'll get to talk tech, we'll get to talk the tea, with our friends and I think that's going to be a lot of fun too. We've already got some of those people and one, one special guest we will have on I'd like, we're going to do an episode with my business partner, Rose Nyte. I haven't talked a lot about her but she is a co-founder of McLean Forrester and so, but she's she's currently working in a commercial job right now and, but we very much talk about McLean Forrester and she's helping provide our our vision as the CTO, our technical Vision, so we'll have her on, and like she's got great stories and I always love chatting with her so that's going to be a great episode. Awesome. All right I think that wraps up this week I don't know how many minutes we've been going but it's been a few. so stay tuned for the next episodes because they're going to be exciting, they're going to be interesting things that you're going to go, wow I didn't know that, that's quite interesting! S yeah thanks everybody, look forward to the next episode of Tech Tea.
2024-07-29