400- The Intern Who Saved $190K w/David Williams

400-David Williams
Host: Doug Camin
Guest: David Williams
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Doug Camin: All right. David, I'd like to welcome you to the, You've Been Heard IT leadership podcast. I'm Doug Camin. It's a pleasure to have you on the show with us.
David Williams: Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.
Doug Camin: So, David, first off, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where you work, what you do. We'd love to know your background here to start.
David Williams: Yeah. For sure. So currently, I am the CIO at bustle. We are a one hundred and seventy year old law firm based out of Detroit, Michigan. So I've been here for about two years. But historically I've been in other verticals. I've been in financial slash mortgage, I've been in automotive, I've been in healthcare, so over twenty years now in IT. But ironically, I didn't actually start in IT. I didn't even go to school for it. I started as a mechanical engineer, and, due to a massive layoff, I transitioned real quickly to IT.
Doug Camin: So you have a background in mechanical engineering.
David Williams: I do. And actually I am a printed circuit board designer as well. That's actually where my career started. I went from a bowling alley at nineteen to working for an automotive supplier as a librarian, and then a printed circuit board designer.
Doug Camin: This is, perhaps, maybe in some ways, an unsurprising Detroit story, right? You went to work for an auto manufacturing company in some fashion, right?
David Williams: Exactly. Yeah, I had an in. As is typical in the automotive industry, you don't just get it out of school. It's all about who you know. My brother in law worked there, got me the job. And then two and a half years later, almost three years later, they closed the entire facility, and I was out of a job.
Doug Camin: Yeah. Which, manufacturer was that back then?
David Williams: Yeah, it was Eaton.
Doug Camin: Okay. So tell us a little bit about your history. What let's expand on that a little bit. I should say. You mentioned you worked Eaton in the past. You started mechanical engineering. At some point you get laid off. You make this transition into IT. How did you see that transition coming? Like, did it fall in your lap? Did you stumble into it? Were you like, you know what, I actually like computers. I'm going to do this. Like tell us a little more about that so we can see, like how did you make that pivot.
David Williams: Yeah. So I'll actually back up just a little bit. When I was twelve, I was living with my grandparents at the time, and they got us our first home computer, an old four hundred eighty six SE, twenty five megahertz processor. Way back in the day. We got that home. I took that thing apart. I wanted to know how it worked. My grandmother got so pissed at me. I had this thing in pieces and I was just so curious of how this functioned. I was grounded for it for a month when she walked in and I had it in pieces. Put it all back together. Once I got into that, though, I started learning how to write scripts. I made like an Ascii menu for our DOS prompt to load into windows and different applications. I was always fascinated by it. So I've always been like that computer guy to all my friends and everything. And while I was at Eton doing my mechanical stuff and electrical stuff, they would always ask me to help them with computer issues. We had two IT people for seven hundred person company, so within our pod I was the go to person for all little issues I just knew. So it fell in my lap when they closed everything down. One of the guys that also lost his job quickly got a job at a joint venture at an automotive supplier. Only ten people. He's like, hey, we're just getting off the ground. But we need an IT guy. Do you want to pivot and be an IT person? I'm like, absolutely. I get to play with computers all day. I had no idea what I was actually getting into because in my day one, they're like, okay, we're launching three plants in six months and we need you to get all the infrastructure and everything for it. I've never done anything like that before.
Doug Camin: So you're like, here's a stack of three and a half inch disks that have windows three point one on them. We need you to run around and stick all the disks in the drives. Yeah. I think I'm maybe just a couple years behind you. So when I was getting started. We were at the tail end of things like, hey, we got windows NT on this machine. We're going to, here's the disks to do the updates to, NT three point five one type of deal or Nt4. Yeah. And, I remember I was just transitioning out, right? As, Y2K came through, so, the you think about the technology and how it's changed and grown over so many years, like, there was that period where, as personal computers became so prevalent, but everything still required you to largely manually touch every single computer, to do every single thing. You wanted to change the setting on fifty computers, that meant that you, as the person doing it, was going to touch fifty things. Yeah. And then the two thousand really saw that change of I'll call it like realistic automation.
David Williams: Yeah. So, like, I had no exposure to Active Directory group policy at the time. Right. We were just launching windows XP at the time. This was two thousand and four. That. I joined at HPO. That was the joint venture out of Eden that I joined. So I had to learn all that stuff. Thankfully I did have I'll call him a mentor who was part of the parent organizations who kind of took me under his wing and showed me the ropes. But I can only rely on him for so much. But I'm really grateful for that experience. I mean, I was just thrown right to the wolves immediately, just as a bright eyed, bushy tailed twenty two year old. And I was then responsible for all of infrastructure in North America. We spun up. We went from ten people to six hundred people in eighteen months.
Doug Camin: Wow. For you. This was an early IT job. So you ended up in a fairly significant role, but at a very early period in your career, essentially you were the right place at the right time. And you had just, I would say just enough skills, but yet you had the right skills to do the job at a minimum. So, yeah.
David Williams: I mean, I was dedicated to just learning constantly. I was constantly, going on the internet, teaching myself more. I had long eighteen hour days. I just needed to make sure I felt comfortable in what I was getting prone to. And like I mentioned, my mentor, he was really available to me, showed me a lot of stuff that they were doing. And I'm a quick learner, from dedicated to it and disciplined. I'll pick it up. I made a lot of mistakes along the way. Yeah, learn some things along the way for sure. But yeah. Then I quickly transitioned into the leadership role about four years into that job where I started to have people reporting to me from Mexico and Canada.
Doug Camin: So just from listening to some of your history here, it sounds like I would say that it please correct me if my characterization is incorrect, but you ended up in leadership positions very early in your career. You started as a mechanical engineer. Things didn't work out because they shut that plant down. So then you pivot it and you pretty rapidly landed in positions of, relative authority. I mean, you weren't like the CIO or anything, but you were in charge of pulling all this stuff, these plants and setting up lots of stuff. You were the lead person, which probably put you in a place where you had staff and teams developing underneath you. At a pretty young age, I'd say. Is that fair?
David Williams: That's fair. I was twenty six when I had three direct reports. As we spun up our plants in different. And these were twenty four, seven, three hundred sixty five plants. We were responsible for that. They're called plants. Or just in time, where you have basically five hours when you get an order from the customer to get that part on their line or otherwise you shut it down. So there's it's they're high pressure situations as well. You have to have, backups and secondaries and tertiaries to make sure that you can continue moving to not shut down that plant because you get punished for like six grand a minute that you shut down the plant. But each one had their own IT person. And I would get calls at two, three in the morning for support because lines down the, spin up or backup processes figure out what the production issue is. I was twenty six when I was doing this.
Doug Camin: Yeah. So the reason I was putting that out a little bit is just, so being a leader at a younger age, I was also in a similar situation by the time I ended up in an IT consulting business. And so I had a whole team under me of like, Or eight people or so. By the time I was twenty six or twenty seven as well. And I think back about, I like to joke about, forty seven year old me and twenty seven year old me would make very different decisions as leaders.
David Williams: Absolutely true.
Doug Camin: So I love talking to folks who've had leadership experience at younger points in their career. What did you learn? Now that's so different. Like what would you. I would say like, oh, I, go back and do everything different because you probably wouldn't, you're young, you're full of a lot of ideas and opportunities. But what were some of the biggest things that you like? Well, I made some mistakes, like I yelled at that dude back in, whatever. And that was the wrong way to go. And I know now, like how to manage people much better, how to manage their feelings and approaches much better. Yeah. Anything like that. What for you resonates.
David Williams: Two major things for me. One, at a young age, I felt like I needed to be the one in control, calling the shots I needed to put the guardrails on dictate how things are supposed to go, because ultimately it was my responsibility. Now, in my older years, I'm not about control, more about clarity and providing processes and guardrails. And the second thing is, I thought I had to be the smartest one in the room. Yeah, I had to know all the stuff. I had to know how everything worked. And I think Steve Jobs said it best when he said, I don't hire smart people to tell them what to do. I hire smart people for them to tell me what to do. And I think that's a big myth that, the senior IT leadership needs to be the most technological person in the room. They don't they need to rely on people underneath them. People have great ideas. Allow them to foster those ideas, innovate, grow, and then give them the opportunities to do so. Those are the two biggest things that stick out to me, from twenty six year old Dave to forty five year old Dave.
Doug Camin: Mhm. Yeah. I think about a lot of the same things, like Particularly like the need to feel like the smartest person in the room, like you feel like you got a lot to prove when you're young. And sometimes people validate that need, like they come at you and they're like, well, what the hell are you? You're this young guy, you're talking to somebody who's like fifty five, right? And you're twenty seven and you're like, this is how this works. And they treat you like you have to prove to them and, so like some of the cycles here can feed into that as well. I think, I also think about some of the differences in the workplace over time, like, the things that were acceptable in, nineteen ninety eight or two thousand and two or two thousand and four that are not acceptable in twenty twenty four or twenty twenty six. The hierarchy of management is like so different now than it was twenty years ago. And how you have to show up to motivate staff to get things done feels different than it did back then.
David Williams: I agree with that. And I've always said, and I learned this the hard way. Leaders does not mean the title that you have, the title that you have, and the position that you have does not make you a leader. It can make you a manager. There's a big difference that I had to learn between managing and leading. Leading is more about servant leadership. Fostering innovation, giving people opportunities to grow, providing just calm presence, safety, trust. That's leading. And I've seen leaders even at the bottom rungs of organization.
Doug Camin: Yeah. I'd like to sometimes joke about leading people. It's not I didn't invent this phrase, but leading from behind, like managing up, so like, I think about as a leader, my role is I don't just manage the people that are kind of, like below me, if you will, in a hierarchy of the chain. But I also have to manage up to, what's that relationship look like? How am I interacting with them? How do we get them to buy in and understand what's going on? For whatever initiative, whatever thing we're doing, whatever stuff. And it's hard because in the role that, we live in is technology, the other people. I don't want to be like, oh, they're all rubes. They don't understand tech or anything else like that. But their job is not to understand the technology. Their job is to do some other job, and your job is to understand the technology. So, it oftentimes the tech component of it can be really complicated to understand. So I've also found the ability to describe the technical and non-technical terms so that people feel comfortable. They don't feel stupid when you tell them that that's really, really powerful. When working. And that's something like over the years, I feel like I've developed as a skill that becomes really valuable as a leader, So then you think like you could be intimidating as a forty plus year old IT leader to staff. But if they feel like they can sit down and chat with you and not feel like you're going to like, talk over their head, then they feel good about that.
David Williams: I agree. Yeah. And I really talk about in terms of not the technology but more the purpose behind it, the outcome, the pain that we're trying to solve with this. The tech stuff can be taught. I've always told people when I hire in, I usually hire in only at first level. I don't typically bring in second and third levels from the outside. I like to promote from within because I can grow these people, but I look for drive and customer service skill like I want you to be driven. I want you to be hungry and learn. I will invest in you in that. And we can teach you all the technology stuff. You'll learn that along the way. But if you understand why we're doing what we're doing, the purpose, the solutions that we're trying to bring, the problems that we're trying to solve, we can get on board with that. You can learn the technology secondary.
Doug Camin: Mhm. So jump around a little bit here. Your current role you mentioned you work for a law firm and you've been in other industries. What's different?
David Williams: Oh, what's different about a law firm? I wouldn't even say this is really different, but they are probably the most adverse to change I have ever been a part of.
Doug Camin: Yeah. Real challenge.
David Williams: Real challenge. Especially here, we have people that have been here literally for fifty five years.
Doug Camin: Mhm.
David Williams: And that whole mantra of, you can't affect it. This is how we've always done things. You can't affect my day to day. It was very prevalent when I came here. And that was how the previous regime handled things. Hadn't updated anything in over two years. They had servers all over the place and they had no idea what. Things that weren't even licensed. It was a mess and it was all around. We can't affect change here. We can't affect how they're doing their day to day, and I flipped that on its head completely. I now we are a very innovative company. We actually I spun up a team called Knowledge Management and Continuous Improvement, where we meet every week and we are literally going throughout the entire firm processes, procedures and analyzing everything and saying, how can we make this better? How can we make this just a little bit better? We live by this mantra, this aggregation of marginal gains, just finding that next one percent continuously. But those add up over time. But I had to build trust and rapport with them and showing them how they can trust that change is a good thing. Change is inevitable, right? And it started with going through the history of how the company has evolved over the last twenty years that you've been changing. Change is a good thing, and we have to keep changing. Technology is changing at a rapid, rapid pace, and if you don't adapt, you're going to die.
Doug Camin: So I'm glad you brought up the pace of technological change. And what, in the law industry in particular right now, you're facing a lot of, the AI, changes are really having a particular impact. I mean, everybody makes AI. This AI, everything. But there are certain industries that are particularly, at least in the current incarnation, the current setup that are particularly being affected. Like programming jobs are really being impacted. Paralegal work in the law space, like research and support staff organizations and those types of things. Those tools are tremendously useful to do and augment those roles and fundamentally reduce the need for headcount in certain instances. So, like, how are you seeing that impact and change? The work that's happening in your space, just being in the middle of an industry that is so clearly, impacted by the current incarnation of those tools.
David Williams: Yeah, we've been having those discussions, especially at our board level, quite frequently, because you're right, a lot of these AI tools and things are replacing, what, probably seventy five, eighty percent of lower level associates and paralegals are doing on a day to day basis. But we're taking a slightly different approach to that, where our more senior attorneys, who are not technologically advanced, are focusing more on bringing the work in. So they're more almost a sales side of things CRM, business development, creating client relationships, and they're at the much higher rates. We're talking seven, eight hundred dollars an hour. So instead of them doing the work, they defer that down to those that are technologically savvy and leveraging the tools, not replacing them. We kind of think that AI isn't going to replace them, but those that don't use AI effectively will be replaced. So we're really training up our paralegals, our associates, our legal assistants to leverage the tools. Now, that does mean that they can take on more work. So inevitably it will reduce headcount overall. We don't need forty legal assistants now. We can leverage AI and do it with about twenty twenty five. We have natural succession plans. I'm grateful that I'm at an organization that really thinks about its people first. If someone's job is threatened because of the technological tool, they will actually find other things for them to do until they're ready to move on or move out or retire. They're not going to be the ones to slash. Well, great. We just saved twenty people. We think about people's livelihoods first and foremost. We'll find other things for them to do. We're also taking a very cautious approach. We have a very sophisticated cybersecurity, practice that sees the dangers in AI. So they're very cautious about how we're leveraging it.
Doug Camin: Cybersecurity as a legal practice.
David Williams: As a legal.
Doug Camin: Practice. Yeah. Okay.
David Williams: Yeah. And they're dealing with it on a daily, AI deepfakes, breaches etcetera. And they just want to make sure that we're not dipping our toe too much into the technology and putting ourselves at risk. So we do a very, very heavy vetting process. We actually have most generative AI blocked here, through the browser. But, there's still that shadow AI. I mean, people can do it at home and whatnot on a personal PCs, but it's really about educating them. We're doing AI classes every month. We do power prompting every month. We do cybersecurity training every month. And people really appreciate that. We do trust them. But we believe in Meaningfully educating them on the benefits of it and the pitfalls of it. It's not a solution to everything, but it is a tool and you need to know how to use it correctly.
Doug Camin: So where have you found those tools to be the most useful today?
David Williams: I would say the AI stuff is really being the most useful for us. But one thing that we had to do, which most organizations don't know, is they just want to throw these agents on top of very unstructured data, and it's not very efficient. Like, you have to structure things appropriately for it to be smooth and effective. Thankfully we did all that so we can have millions and millions of documents and case files in our document management system. And now we have an AI that can crawl over that. And you can ask it any question. Give me my profile for the University of Michigan client in nineteen ninety seven with this person's name in seconds, it'll come back and bring that to you, and then you can further have it build a new brief based on the arguments that you made on there. So our lawyers are finding that very helpful because they would spend hours trying to find things they didn't ask. So the stuff is really a huge efficiency pickup.
Doug Camin: Awesome. Thanks. So about pivot here. I'm going to go back to kind of like the personal side of things. You mentioned, you started to tell a bit of a story about, back in the day, the forty six at home and you dismantled that and all this other stuff like that. So you were always interested in technology from the time, when you were younger going forward? At what point did you, see technology as your field and like, that you really wanted to be in. What prompted you to, like, feel that like, was there any pivotal moments where you're like, this thing happened or this stuff? And I was like, that's for me.
David Williams: Yeah, I told you I was always the the tech guy. When I was at Eaton, even when I was at the bowling alley, I set up the bowling. Alley there. I was doing side work. I installed tanning beds that were technologically advanced. I never felt like I was working when I was working on new technology. And, somebody once told me, I know it's an old cliche. If you do something that you're passionate about, you'll never work a day in your life, right? And find a way to get paid to do it. That always really stuck with me. So when that opportunity came up, I said, hey, you want to be our IT guy? Like, are you kidding me? You're going to pay me to just work on new technology and computers? Heck yeah. Sign me up.
Doug Camin: The idea behind doing things that you enjoy, and having that kind of blend in makes work not feel like such a burden. I'm one of those people, I think, just like you, it sounds like where, the work that I do through the day, it seamlessly moves back and forth between the things that I do in my personal life. Because I don't feel burdened by it. I don't feel like I'm when I step into the job, that I have to be like, okay, stop personal life, start work life, everything must stop here. I must be like, zero distractions focused on this. And there are some jobs that that's not possible. You know, if I was going to be a police officer or something like that, obviously I can't just, like, transition in and out of being that, or working on an assembly line in a manufacturing plant or like, being like a welder or something like that. But there are a ton of jobs that you can, move in and out of it and being passionate about it is good. You can't float in and out of being a teacher, but you can love doing it, and it doesn't feel so burdensome.
David Williams: Yeah, Totally agree. It's a natural transition. I mean, the things that I do at work, I do at home, too. I'm constantly researching. I'm reading articles on new technology, I'm getting new ideas, and it's not really for work. It's for my own edification. I love to keep up on what's out there.
Doug Camin: Yeah. Speaking of at home, is your home? There's kind of like two answers for this with, like tech folks. There's the tech folks that are, like, tech enthusiasts. My house is, like, fully automated. I could voice control it from, like, Paris if I was traveling and everything would turn on and off and it would look like, home alone with like, yeah, yeah, or there's the people that are like, I have one device, it's a printer that checks in for ink, and I keep next to it in case it does something I don't like. And I have to like, put a stop to it, you know?
David Williams: Yeah, I definitely fall in the latter camp. Yeah. I mean, I will admit I do have like a Amazon Echo Dot where I have like on routines and stuff like that for like smart lights and whatnot. But, that's relatively recent. But I'd rather live in the middle of nowhere in the woods with nature than technology.
Doug Camin: I have like, I follow a similar, category. Like I have some smart thermostats, but there's no Siri or the Amazon Echo Yeah.
David Williams: I'm also responsible for all of our cybersecurity. And I see how the dangers of the IoT world and things getting compromised all the time. It's like, I don't want any part of it. Honestly, I don't trust it. I just don't trust it.
Doug Camin: Yeah, I feel you there. So, like you mentioned this four eighty six I'm going to keep going back to this, but what was your first computer? Like how did you get exposed to the technology?
David Williams: Well, I mean, that was the first computer, the family one. But then I built my own when I was fifteen. So I started getting a job at Myer and then Walmart and started to collect money. And I built my own. I don't remember the specs of that thing. I remember it had a fifty six K modem, and I thought it was so cool that fifty six K modem, started doing LAN parties around the country.
Doug Camin: What games? What games are you doing? LAN parties?
David Williams: We were doing Descent Three and then Unreal Tournament when that came out. Unreal. Okay. Oh, man, that was our jam. And we would go probably once a quarter, twice a quarter to various houses and we'd have like fifty, sixty people in garage lan party was awesome.
Doug Camin: Nice, nice. Of course. Yeah. You don't even need a computer. Well, our phones are fundamentally more powerful than any computer we had twenty years ago.
David Williams: Absolutely.
Doug Camin: But the single device that you could hold in the palm of your hand, you can do what we had to lug equipment back into somebody's physical proximity. You had to lug equipment into physical proximity with other people, with equipment in order to make happen.
David Williams: Yep.
Doug Camin: So, a couple questions here on leadership and what your perception So for you, what do you think are the key like distillation elements of being a good leader?
David Williams: Being a good leader really means to focus on the growth of others that are in your charge. In my mind, I'd say the most proud moment I've ever had in my career of being a leader is when I took a chance on someone who was a cable technician, but he was very driven, never been in it before. Brought him into my help desk. Eventually he looked up to be a sysadmin, and I got him as high as I could within our organization, and he left. And three years later, he texted me that. Thank you for the chance that you took on me and what you instilled in me and taught me, because now I'm director of it was actually part of the state of Michigan director of it. That was just so impactful in my life as a leader that investing in people, pulling out of them what they don't believe about themselves, showing them the capabilities that they have. That was my pivotal moment for knowing what a leader should be, is investing in your people and fostering their growth and giving them the opportunities
Doug Camin: Nice. So it's a great story. I appreciate you sharing that. What advice would you give to people who are coming up in their leadership journey?
David Williams: Be quick to listen. Don't be quick to respond. You definitely want to listen to everyone in the room first, because people actually have a lot to say, but you need to give them an environment to say it. Tell them that you want to hear their ideas. No ideas. Too stupid to hear. They have a lot to bring. There was actually a story I just read on LinkedIn, from the CEO, who they were looking at an enterprise AI revolutionary system or threat management that was going to be two hundred thousand dollars. And their intern said, did you ever consider this platform? It's open source, cost you fifty bucks a month. It does the same thing. And, the sales guy is like, oh, well, that's not enterprise ready. They did a POC side by side over a four week span, and the open source outperformed the two hundred thousand dollars solution. But the system was like, you saved me like one hundred and ninety grand a year. They took that. They brought in two more security engineers. It's continuing to outperform. It's doing very well. Now that intern is a senior security engineer, you need to listen. You don't need to have all the answers because there's going to be answers to questions that you don't even know. And there are people that could be smarter than you or have experienced that are younger than you, that you need to listen to your people and allow them to speak up. Let everyone know that they have a voice.
Doug Camin: So I was just taking a peek at your LinkedIn profile, David, and you mentioned that you're a speaker. So tell me a little more about this.
David Williams: Yeah. So I've been on many panels. When I was in mortgage actually, Ice mortgage previously, Ellie May had invited me several times to speak, from the customer perspective, and then just on a leadership perspective, most recently, I was in the president's Club. I was a four time Innovation Award winner from Ice for the children. Like a build type person, I will bring in our own developers in, We like to innovate. We like to do customizations. So I won the award four times. So they brought me on several times to speak at their conference in front of very large crowds. And I'm looking to get back into doing that. From a leadership perspective. I may be speaking at a couple of conferences this year, and one of our lawyers actually nominated me to do a Ted talk here in Detroit.
Doug Camin: Wow. That's awesome.
David Williams: Yeah.
Doug Camin: Okay, so now really wrapping up here, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us here on the, You've Been Heard podcast.
David Williams: Yeah. Really appreciate the time, Doug. Great.
Doug Camin: All right. All right, well, everyone, we will be back next time for another episode of, You've Been Heard. Thank you, David, and thank you to all of our listeners. And we'll see you next time.