Inspiration: A Powerful Partner Tool

How does a lion hunting dentist from Minnesota, a 2012 Olympics sourced data center and Cisco’s IoT conundrum develop into a powerful partnership, a master class in strategic alliances and eventually this blog?  Fair question.  A few of us started seeing the connection after that dinner with the World Wildlife Fund. 

What if?  It’s maybe the best question we ever ask ourselves.  What if I change companies/careers?  What if I track my calories and start walking?  And in this case, what if we could actually use IoT to prevent illegal rhino poaching and save a species?

That’s a pretty bold ‘what if”, but the answer was even bolder.  We could create a superhero story about technology “saving the world”, on a topic that EVERYONE was interested in at the time, that could easily transition into a use case that extends into commercial and industrial sales opportunities.  One catch, we actually have to prevent the extinction of rhinos for this thing to work.

But it was going to take the power of a partnership to make it happen, so on the flight home from London, we sketched out how we might pull this off with Dimension Data, Cisco’s then largest revenue generating partnership at well over $2B annually.

Dimension Data made sense.  They were large enough to generate VIP (Value Incentive Program) joint marketing funds, so we had a budget we could access.  They were known in the industry for integrating complex solutions to solve BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals).  They were based in Africa, specifically South Africa. And their founder, Doc Watson, a wildlife conservation activist was also a large landowner in one of the most incredible conservation reserves in Africa, the Sabi Sands.  Oh, and he was the executive sponsor for the strategic alliance with Cisco too.  Nice.

Cisco on the other hand was going to take some convincing, but we had three things going for us.  

1. Cisco had the problem - How do we inspire businesses to take IoT as seriously as consumers were taking wearables.  

2. Cisco had the technology - We weren’t sure then and some of it was still in stealth mode, but we had it.

3. Cisco had partnerships - With device vendors that would fill out the networking and data solution. 

The challenge was how do we get the right people convinced and engaged.  Well I guess we had one more thing going for us - Luck.

The entire marketing leadership team led by our then CMO, Karen Walker, was meeting in Raleigh, NC at our Research Triangle Park campus and my flight from London was expected to land there just in time to make the Thursday evening “Meet the Executives” happy hour.

Armed with the sincere interest of one customer, a loose commitment from the partner and a hastily drafted set of slides, I went table to table speaking with every marketing leader in the room.  By the end of the night, we had landed roughly at “It’s just crazy enough to work”.  The consensus opinion was as long as this partnership can IN FACT, reduce poaching and save rhinos from impending extinction we could green light the marketing campaign.

Great, so now all we had to do was garner resources, solve a major world issue, hold our marketing executives to their word, launch a global marketing campaign and then hope it actually resonated with our enterprise customers.  Easy peasy.

OK, that’s a lot, but garnering the resources was actually pretty easy.  I mean, we were proposing a bunch of engineers fly to South Africa and effectively go on safari.  There was no shortage of volunteers.  Our then Chief Innovation Officer, Dave Ward was immediately on board.  A fellow upper midwesterner, famous for taking mainstage at industry conferences, shoeless - YES, shoeless, David was a well known character apt to inspire audiences with his uniquely accurate vision of the technology future ahead of us.  He ran Cisco’s “stealth mode” research teams and their connections into academia and had insights into the newest forthcoming technologies. He assigned a small team of engineers led by Kristen Wright and partnered with Dimension Data tech leaders Wolf Stinnes and Johnny Van Der Vyver.

With the team assembled and initial buy-in from executives at both companies we were ready to go “save the world”.  It was all just a 20 hour commercial flight, a bush commuter plane and one harrowing helicopter ride away.  

To be continued . . .