Juniper & Citrix: Down Memory Lane

One of the things that made the first half of 2018 special was being visited in Hong Kong by former colleagues - specifically from the days when I worked in the tech industry. In January a former colleague from Citrix, Charles Fernandes, managed to route a China business trip through Hong Kong. This allowed us to catch-up for a meeting followed by lunch with ESF colleague Paul Munder, also a tech industry veteran. 

Charles Fernandes is based in Bangalore and during my Citrix days, I made numerous trips to the Indian city. Our meeting reminded me of just how much high-growth technology companies have the capability of accomplishing. The growth was so overwhelming during both my Citrix and Juniper Networks days it seemed as though each trip to India we were once again discussing how to expand teams to accommodate growth - whether engineering teams with the pure-play products or support teams such as HR or Finance. These teams accomplished amazing amounts. Meeting Charles in Hong Kong fondly reminded me of those days.

Memories continued when Joanne Merrick graced us with her presence on a whirlwind trip through Hong Kong a few months later. Joanne was the APAC L&OD lead for my last three years at Juniper. During those days we were redefining performance management, re-launching the Juniper brand to be aligned with Juniper’s organizational values and using tools such as Human Synergistic’s OCI diagnostic to measure Juniper’s culture. (We actually started that process in APAC in 2005 but it went global across Juniper in 2008.) Little did we know at the time that like-minded thinkers would be focused on Neuroleadership ten years later in 2018, which is where Joanne has landed for the next season of her career. 

Just after Joanne’s visit we were blessed with a visit from Paul McNulty. Paul was head of APAC customer service almost from the beginning of my time with Juniper in 2003. I can’t remember how or when Paul was hired into APAC because lived on a plane (and still does to a degree!) Paul’s visit opened the floodgates for all sorts of memories: 

1. Summer 2005 when Paul helped me set-up my first home WiFi router, again Juniper gear. I remember asking, “Do I really need this much security for home WiFi? It’s not like I’m hiding state secrets!” Lol! 
2. A CS QBR off-site in Bangkok when YouTube was still an infant in 2006. (We were all jabbering about it - of course they were running Juniper gear.) By coincidence we stayed in the same hotel from my first trip to Asia in 1990. [I posted my first YouTube video of one of the triplets not long after that QBR.]
3. The QBR when our VP Engineering had just tested the world’s first fibre optic wireless signal. He was accessing the Internet while on the bullet train from Osaka to Tokyo. NTT Japan flipped the switch on for him to test the tech. “Did it work,” I asked? “Did you get my QBR deck?” was the response. “Yeah about that, the file was huge!” This stuff was amazing and exciting: these companies were building the Internet.
4. The whirlwind Asia tour with Scott Kriens and Jocelyn Kung to deliver The Leadership Pipeline workshops from Japan to India and Australia. Crazy days!
5. And finally a 2010 breakfast meeting with Greg Pryor in The Junos Cafe where we scribbled out on a napkin what we thought The Next Generation of performance management ought to look like. I should have saved that napkin!

Our three visitors returned a floodgate of cherished memories of what’s capable when you have a team of passionate committed individuals working towards big audacious goals. In 2003 when I joined Juniper I asked for a headcount report. There were 106 employees and the following week we added 16 in India in a mini-acquisition. When I left Juniper in 2011 there were over 3,200 APAC employees.

Some of our mantras during the time:

Keep It Simple: We always knew that hyper-growth would make solutions short-lived. Inevitably, today’s solutions would be tomorrow’s problems. For example at Juniper we went through not one but two Peoplesoft upgrades. Better to keep things simple and easy to make them easier to unwind in the future.

Net Producer Of Value: Being in a regional HR role, we were always being asked by Corp HQ to produce regional reports for this that and the other thing. This would tax the time of the downstream internal clients, but at the end of the day we always said HR had to be a “Net Producer of Value.” Otherwise internal clients would cringe whenever we called or emailed. 

Generate Insights About the Business: One of the best ways to provide insights to the business was through data analytics. We were always analyzing data in unique ways, whether attrition, employee engagement or performance management to help generate insights into the business.

I actually left Juniper twice, the first time in 2007, boomeranging back just over a year later. Below is the farewell video I made upon first departing Juniper. The resolution is terrible... how far we have come in the past eleven years! But still, for those who want a trip down memory lane, I have posted the farewell video below. Lots of old Juniper pictures!

I moved on from tech and am now in the education industry. It is not lost on me how I am similarly surrounded by amazing colleagues just as I was in the tech industry. Last week we welcomed 80 new overseas teachers to ESF at our annual induction. We reminded them that while they might be new to Hong Kong, they are not new to teaching. At that point our CEO asked, "By the way, how many of you are ESF graduates?" About ten of them raised their hands to which we all cheered: Welcome Home!

What are your favourite work memories from long ago? Please share them below in the comments section and if you enjoyed this post, please click the thumbs up icon (above or below) to let me know and pass it on. Thank you! #GrabYourDream2018