What’s Next is a biweekly conversation between SDxCentral CEO Matt Palmer and a senior-level executive from the technology industry. In each video, Matt has an informal but in-depth video chat with a fellow thought leader to uncover what the future holds for the enterprise IT and telecom markets — the hook is each guest is a long-term acquaintance of Matt’s, so expect a lively conversation. This time out, Palmer spoke with Mike Bushong, VP data center at Nokia. Bushong spent almost 20 years at Juniper Networks before moving into his role at Nokia. He offers an uncommon blend of technology savvy, strategic sense, influencing skills and storytelling magic that has allowed him to develop a clear vision, set product direction and gain consensus across diverse internal and external enterprise stakeholders. Editor’s note: The following is a summary of what Palmer and Bushong discussed in their the first part of their conversation, edited for length. To hear the rest, be sure to watch the video. Matt Palmer: I'd love to get your perspective on people, and share that with our audience. Let's start there because we'll get to the tech stuff later. But where do you see the impact for infrastructure professionals and networking professionals today? Mike Bushong: There's a lot going on on the people side. I actually mentor a lot of folks who are working through transitions in their careers. And when you have all this hype — software defines this, it can be virtualized that, it can be Kubernetes, whatever it can be, AIOps, GPU clusters — there's just a lot of change. And when all that change comes in, it's more than we can absorb as individuals. The average person is not spending 30 hours a week reading up and staying current because they have day jobs. And this means that a relatively small number of people are gonna have a practitioner's knowledge of any of these new things. And if you're one of those people it can be frustrating, because you see something so clearly. You're standing on top of a hill. You see the other side of the hill and you're like, “Oh, my gosh! Look at this! There's a lush valley, there's a river behind it. Come on, everybody.” And everyone else is up the hill they can't see over the top. All they see is the toil and the grind. And then, as an individual, I think there's an entire class of people that are fully unprepared to manage things because they've they've trained their technical skills and they're objectively world-class. But they haven't cultivated their leadership skills. What I always tell people is, if you fancy yourself a thought leader, by definition everybody disagrees with you. Because if everyone agreed with you, you'd be a consensus thinker, right? And so, as we go through all these changes, and it becomes obvious to you that your team should adopt a different tool chain. Or have a different process to handle things. Or maybe you're going down the DevOps path. Or maybe you're evaluating SONiC. There's all kinds of different technical decisions where people are going to fall over, where companies are fundamentally going to fail. They have the technical perspective, but lack the leadership skills required to enroll other people in what they're trying to do. Leadership in data center matters more today than at any point over the last 20 years. And I don't mean leadership like an individual working at a vendor. I mean leadership inside these companies. If I could boil that down to just one statement, there is going to be incredible opportunity. But I would challenge anybody listening today, to not consider things like communication and leadership as soft skills. These are hard skills. They're trained and learned just like hitting a baseball or playing a piano. What you've got to do is put the effort into that because you were probably right in your technical assessments. But you will not be successful unless you can get other people to come along. Which means the thing you have to be good at is both the technology and at understanding what it takes to get people to to buy into what you're seeing. Watch the full video for the rest of the conversation between these old friends and colleagues, who also happen to be tech visionaries...and watch out for Part 2 of this conversation in mid-June.