How can you find the truth when everything is in flux?  20 Great Answers with Philip Meyer, Founder & CEO Catalyst 345.

Philip Meyer (00:01): 

The danger is we’re not taking security in governance. I very rarely hear, “Oh, I didn’t know I was oversharing in my business. Oh, I didn’t know I need to classify the data in my organization. Oh, so it’s not safe to put my inbox or my customer data into an AI engine that’s consumer-based because it’s learning my customers’ names and all their marketing details?” You numbnut, didn’t you realize you shouldn’t be using consumer grade AI and putting company data into it or intellectual property into it? Oh, I didn’t know it was then in training the model, and somebody else could ask a question about it. Look, mate, if you want to do holiday planning and get mystery destinations, fill your boots. But really, when you’re doing work stuff, don’t use consumer-grade AI. 

Barrie Seppings (01:04): 

Welcome to Plugged In, Switched On, where we pull you into the conversations that matter in B2B tech marketing. I am your host, Barrie Seppings. I’m the executive creative director from Splendid Group, but the quote you just heard at the top of the show was from Philip Meyer. He is the CEO and founder of Catalyst 345 and a 34-and-a-half-year veteran of Microsoft from Philip in just a moment. Now, if you are new to the pod, let me show you around. We try to do three things here at Plugged In, Switched On. The first thing is we get some of the most interesting experts in B2B tech marketing. To come into the studio, tell us how and why they do what they do. Secondly, some of our episodes, we look at the core skills or practice areas in B2B tech marketing and pull them apart, look at the current state of them, where they are heading. 

(01:54): 

These are really good episodes if this is an area where you feel like you might want to skill up or move into. And finally, we do a third type of episode where we take a deep dive, pull back the curtain on remote teams, high performance teams, managers, and leaders to work out how they are getting the best performance out of those teams. But we’re not doing all three things at once. We like a little bit of focus. Today’s episode is our patented 20 questions episode. We ask every guest on these episodes the same 20 questions, but we always get 20 really different answers. Let’s ask those questions. Philip Meyer from Catalyst 345. Your first Plugged In, Switched On. question, which is, as always, the elevator pitch. Philip, Mike, can you tell us what your company or brand selling and why should anybody pay good money for it? 

Philip Meyer (02:50): 

So the brand name is Catalyst 345, and the 345 comes from 34 and a half years of having worked for Microsoft. And the word catalyst is because I really like the word catalyst, but it also represents change. And so, having worked for a large organization for all of those years and being told you’re redundant, it’s time to change, adapt. So hence that’s where the brand name. So the promise in terms of this company of at the moment just one with no aspirations of becoming more than one, is really helping a rich community of partners that are out there, Microsoft partners. I’m not trying to be all things to all people. I’m very focused on helping specifically the Microsoft partner communities. Do what I’ve always done, which is try to make it easier for them to understand. There’s a lot of dimensions to a big organization like Microsoft. 

(03:44): 

Many people might think, “Oh, it’s just Microsoft. They do X or Y.” Well, they actually do the whole alphabet and a whole bunch more. So I’m trying to do my best to be across that entire alphabet, which includes not just AI, but all the other elements in that alphabet, security, change management, cloud services, and the like, and simplify that only for our partners through things like workshops, guest speaker at events, educating salespeople. Not a lot. 

Barrie Seppings (04:15): 

Question two is our superhero origin story. Philip, did you grow up dreaming of working in technology or becoming this kind of evangelist and educator? What in high school, late high school, did you think or perhaps were encouraged to go and do for your career? 

Philip Meyer (04:33): 

I wanted to be a fighter pilot from a very early age. I grew up in Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea, as you know, is very much involved in the Second World War, and there were lots of fighter planes that had crashed in the jungle, and I’d go and discover them from time to time. And I thought, I’d like to be a fighter pilot. And I did all the study and preparation for doing that. I even went to the defense in recruitment, sat through a day’s worth of exams, and at the end of the day, they put me on a blood pressure monitor. I was so excited. I failed. Color, coordination, math, science, vision, all good, but failed on the blood pressure. And they said, “Well, you can’t be a fighter pilot, but we’ll let you fly helicopters and transports.” And I went, “Well, that’s not what I want. I want to be a fighter pilot.” 

(05:21): 

So silly me walked out of that and said, “I will go do something else.” And fortunately, the school I was at, they had a careers counselor who said, “What you’ve studied will line you up for computer science.” And as it turned out, I’d been using a little HP 12C, look it up on the internet, what it was, a little handheld computer calculator and programming in reverse policy. I said I could do that. And I got in, did four years of computer science, then went to a computer company, one of the mainframe manufacturers, and then ended up at Microsoft for 34 and a half years. But if I’d wanted to be something on reflection, you know what I would have been, Barrie? I would have liked to have been a history teacher. Now I look back, I would think that being a teacher in school, I’ve got incredible admiration for teachers. I don’t think they get the respect they deserve teachers. 

Barrie Seppings (06:13): 

Question three, which is I do this for free. What part of your job, your day-to-day, do you just naturally enjoy? Do you find yourself spending a lot of time on it? And then conversely, who do you think’s got the worst job or the job you’d least like to do in the B2B tech ecosystem? 

Philip Meyer (06:30): 

What I really love doing is learning, as you can tell, the history side. So I love that every day. I really enjoy that. It’s why I get out of bed in the morning, if you will, is that opportunity to learn and carry the journey. But I also like creating tension in a conversation. I’ve done that in panels a few times, and I really get a sense of joy when… When you’ve got 600 people in a room, and most of them are looking at their mobile phone, and you, with another panelist, create this point of conflict of disagreement and everybody’s phones goes down, and they all lean in. And so you’ve now got the room’s attention with tension, attention through tension. And so learning comes from that as well. So that’s the stuff I actually like. There’s an old slogan that came out from Windows 95 days. 

(07:18): 

Yes, I’ve been around a long time. Make trouble, good stuff will happen, and there is an element of that, maybe not as far as where you were referring to earlier, where there’s trouble occurring, but, yes, in the general sense of where the industry is at the moment in the IT industry, you create a little bit of tension about one approach versus another. There’s some really good learnings that can come from those points of tension. So that’s the sort of what I like doing. I won’t say for free, I do that for a fee now, but I do enjoy it. But the thing that probably I, would you term it the worst or disappointing thing is covering things that I feel people should know. 

(08:01): 

If they were self-motivated learners, they would know that information. So I get a little frustrated, dare I say, and it’s kind of counter to what I do in teaching people, but there’s some things you can learn yourself, but it’s something I get frustrated with when you sit a group of people, and they go, “No, I didn’t read that. No, I didn’t study that.” You didn’t do the pre-req before you turned up in the room, and I go, “We told you what you’re supposed to have done. Read this, study that, write so and-so.” And they turn up, and you haven’t done it. So that’s probably what I get disappointed about. 

Barrie Seppings (08:38): 

Question four, control, alt, delete. What’s the one career move or moment you wish you could go back and undo? Can you recall there was a moment in your career, it was really clear that you just learned a really valuable lesson? 

Philip Meyer (08:51): 

There’s a personal lesson learned where you think that after all this time at Microsoft, I’d be worth squillions, I’m not, because I trusted somebody with my finances to give me financial advice. So the learning there was, well, it all went away. And anyway, I’m happy to declare I went bankrupt, and I can assure anybody who’s been through that moment that if you need to talk to somebody, you can find me. I’m happy to talk you through that, what goes on. And that was trust was broken. 

(09:21): 

I trusted too much, and I didn’t take responsibility for my own financial position. I empowered this person too much. And then I also learned the same lessons, silly me not learning from history. I did that in a work context too, when I was managing the relationship with an agency who said, “We will collect the fees for you on event execution, and we’ll be there, and we’ll pay you back that money that we collect as fees as you pay us for what work we do.” And that agency disappeared with a lot of our money, and I then had to face fairly senior management in Microsoft with a please explain how come this is going to cost us so much. So that kind of trust, understanding the rudimentaries of just going a little deeper, you think you’ve gone deep, go another layer, go another layer to ensure that you really are working with a trusted entity. 

Barrie Seppings (10:21): 

Question five is shout out. Who have you learned the most from in your career, even if perhaps it was what not to do? 

Philip Meyer (10:30): 

Big shout-out to the person who hired me into Microsoft. I think I learned a lot from Jennifer Zanich, and this is back in, gosh, 1990 when she hired me in and at that time, it was a real state of flux. There were so many technologies for Microsoft, a lot of change. There was no internet, so using social media and podcasts just didn’t exist. So it was all about events, but you can appreciate that if you’re in this state of flux, you don’t know when to run the event. 

(10:59): 

What’s the truth? What’s the truth? And her teaching to me was, “Run the event, you will find the truth on the day.” And that’s the big learning to me. And I will push organizations who are in a state of flux, where it’s a dynamic, to go and run an event, find a good agency like you guys, and push through to get that event, because you’ll get your truth on the day, and if the truth changes tomorrow, so be it. And I really like that, creating that defining moment in a world of flux. And so, shout out to Jennifer Zanich, if she’s listening, I really appreciate the learning you gave me. 

Barrie Seppings (11:36): 

All right. Question six, the only constant in this life is marketing cliches. The rate of change, we just talked about that. It’s accelerated, even celebrated, perhaps even fetishized in the tech world. Yet as humans, we kind of hate change. We pretend we like it. We really don’t. How do you feel… Over these 34 and a half years, how have you been able to motivate yourself to continually lean into change? There’s that element of loving to learn, but at some point, don’t you just get exhausted? Don’t you want everything just to stop? 

Philip Meyer (12:08): 

No, Barrie, no. I love change. I think it’s that fight a pilot in me. You don’t know what the terrain’s going to be, and in the computer industry, I found that same joy. Every day you wake up with something that’s different, something that’s changed. And so very much when I went through one of these strength finders, and I commend anybody to go through a strength finder exercise, I came out with this big high bar on adapt that I love and adapt very quickly to things that are going on in the work context. Now, if you ask me about my personal life, I’m a man of habit. I get up in the morning, I always do the… Put the dog out, go for a little walk, and do my cereal the same way. So, in that side of the life, I find it a little bit harder to change, that’s my habitual side, but when it’s a work sense, I embrace change, love change. 

Barrie Seppings (13:05): 

Question seven. Here’s to your health. We’re sitting down all the time. We’re on computers. What do you do to maintain your physical health or your sense of wellness when your job is demanding, but also sometimes can be sedentary? 

Philip Meyer (13:20): 

Well, I think there’s two elements of that, if I may. One is a physical side, and one’s a mental side. The physical side, I got a nice little bit of land out of Beecroft in the northwest of Sydney. So I kind of use the commentary around being farm fit. I’ve got a lot of lawn to do. I’ve got hedges to cut. I’ve got roses to prune. I’ve got a garden to maintain. I’ve got the dog, and I also play tennis pretty regularly with a mate, and I’ve got a bike riding group, a mountain biking group that I go out with. So I think the physical side’s pretty good, and walking. So when we go on holidays, my wife and I are avid walking tour, as free walking tour type people, 15Ks a day, kind of stuff. So the physical side, I think I’m okay. And as a person who’s had two back surgeries in his life, I’m very conscious about posture and maintaining core strength anyway. On the mental side, I think it’s reading history. 

(14:21): 

The reading of history books, I’m reading about the bridge at the moment, the 1932, The Bridge, Sydney Harbor Bridge. I finished the book on World War I when I was on holidays and being an ambulance driver. So I think that keeps my mental side, but there’s a funny thing about having people in a physical sense that helps with your mental sense. I refer to tennis, and I refer to my bike riding group. I genuinely believe they give me mental stability as well. It’s another dimension. Something that I counsel, and I give it to my wife, she said, “Keep them busy and keep them poor,” when we were raising them. 

(14:56): 

And keeping them busy is about having multiple dimensions to your life, not just single dimensional. I just don’t go to work. So I had swim club, bike club, tennis club, music club, go to trumpet lessons. And I think in a child’s raising, and this is what I’ve kind of learned through my wife, is have different dimensions because if something goes bad in one, you’ve got the other groups that are giving you a positive side mentally, and there can be a physical element to that too. So keep them poor, keep them busy, and keep them multidimensional. 

Barrie Seppings (15:28): 

Why keep them poor? 

Philip Meyer (15:30): 

I just looked at the people who had a lot of money, and their kids, and the fix from the parent was, “Here’s 200 bucks, go, have a great weekend.” And it ended up being alcohol with little supervision. Keeping them poor also taught our children. I could have given them things, but they had to go and cut chicken heads off and gut chickens to earn some money. They had to go and teach kids how to swim at the swimming club. They get a sense of the value of money through having to work for their money, and so that later in life, even though they’re blessed, they’re very fortunate children in their own, really not through me, apart from putting them through school, they are now very conscious about doing value rather than just his money. 

Barrie Seppings (16:14): 

Question eight, unique snowflakes. Now, every market or industry or territory or whatever group you want to think of thinks they are different, they’re a little bit special. In your experience, which one really is? Is there an industry or a subgenre or a segment of the market of the audience that really needs to get talked to a little bit differently or handled a bit differently, particularly in terms of talking them into technology solutions or getting them adapted to technology? 

Philip Meyer (16:43): 

I think every industry can benefit from the hot topic at the moment, which is AI. So AI, I think everyone. What I think about is what makes that snowflake, what makes that snowflake stand out, what makes that billiard table that’s red stand out from all the other color on the green cloth. I’ve found, I guess it just came to me, what I call the four whys, why you, why you, why you, and many people answer a question with the same as what their peers are. “Oh, I’m a managed service provider. Oh, I’m a farmer. Oh, I’m a retail operator.” “Why? Why is that? Why you though? Why should I buy from you?” “Oh, because I’m in your local area.” “But why in this local area there are other retailers?” Another level of why. “Because I’m family-owned.” “Oh, but why your family? There’s another one that’s family owned.” “Because I give to the community through such and such.” 

(17:37): 

Oh, full whys till I finally find out that I like a family that’s giving to other people. Why didn’t you tell me that first? So that idea that every organization can be unique in every industry, but I’ve got to so often fight with that partner to find out what their unique value prop through four whys before I get to it. So rather than me having to ask you four whys, why don’t you give me the fourth one first? 

Barrie Seppings (18:01): 

All right. Question nine, green with envy. What’s the campaign or event or idea or launch something you’ve seen out there in the marketing world, and it doesn’t have to be restricted to technology, you’ve seen that you really wish you’d done or you’dbeen a part of? 

Philip Meyer (18:15): 

I really wish I’d been part of the launch of Windows XP back in 2002. I’d been product manager for OS/2, Windows NT for many years, and I’d stepped away from at about Windows NT5 or 4.1 and SQL7 and another chat popped in and was doing the launch of Windows XP, which turned out to be a massive launch. Massive, absolutely huge. Rove McManus on stage, interviewing there, having a chat, and I’m going, “Why wasn’t it me? Why didn’t I get to do that one?” I’d done my little fanfare with Windows NT and a stage full of dancers with different uniforms on, and that was pretty cool, but getting Rove on stage to talk about technology, and nope, I had stepped away from being a product manager for the launch of that product. 

Barrie Seppings  (19:08): 

Question 10, that really gets my goat. What’s the one thing in this industry? We are talking about the tech industry, now that has gone on for too long and really needs fixing. 

Philip Meyer (19:19): 

Ooh, and I know I’m going to ruffle some feathers with this comment. 

Barrie Seppings (19:22): 

Do it. 

Philip Meyer (19:25): 

I’m a technology purist. I did computer science. I started off in a mainframe company where everything was built to work together, very much like the Apple ecosystem of today. It all kind of works beautifully together, use other things, and it doesn’t. Now, having spent, yes, and I’m showing my Microsoft colors even though I got made redundant, it’s so complete. It’s all there. The operating systems, even the devices like Surface, the cloud services, the productivity, the AI, it’s all there. It all works. It just is integrated, and when I find the channel goes and tries to put Lego with Meccano, with DUPLO, with some other building product, and make it work and it fails, you go, “That’s because you’ve tried to put things that don’t naturally work together together.” Now, the bit that’s going to annoy people is the channel because the channel loves making money out of the services of connecting disparate things. 

(20:30): 

When it could be so easy to put the Microsoft stuff in a month, they’d rather charge the customer for a year of integrating all these disconnected, disparate solutions together. So that really gets me, gets my goat when I see them not seeing the value proposition of buying that beautiful new BMW, where everything just works, instead of trying to build their own car. We haven’t built cars for years, tens of years. Okay, there’s some nerdy people out there who do, but in the main, we go and buy a BMW or BYD or a whatever, and it’s a complete secure runs, works, just buy Microsoft guys, but they don’t because they make money out of trying to make things that don’t work together, work and then break and then come in and fix. So that gets my goat because it costs customers money in the long term. It’s less secure, but I get it. I get it. I’m dealing with that ambiguity. I have to accept it that that’s the way that the IT systems are today. 

Barrie Seppings (21:36): 

Question 11, truth serum. In your storied history at Microsoft, you’ve worked with agencies and suppliers, and vendors and all sorts of stuff for events and marketing. What’s the one question you’d ask an agency if you knew they had to tell you the truth? 

Philip Meyer (21:53): 

Would you introduce me to some of your old employees so I can get a perspective of them, from them of your business, and even ex-customers to see why they may have left you? I guess a telling one would be, what are the benefits that are more for you as the agency than they are for me as the client? So what are you going to get out of this by me being with you, and show me where you make more money in this engagement by doing more of that or less of that, that you make more or less by me doing that before we do this contract. So that kind of open book, show me how you make your money, how you don’t make money, but I don’t know that they’d tell me some of those things. It’s all about verifying the ROI in my campaign. 

(22:43): 

How am I going to get verification? And I know many clients don’t do that. They run a campaign, and they actually don’t push the agency back for, well, we got 10,000 leads. Well, did those turn into 2% of the customers? Because you said the conversion rate was two. They’ve already moved on to the next thing. So it’s about holding the agency to account on that ROI. You said I was going to get 2% transfer into revenue of this amount I never did. You’re on the line now because you didn’t get 2%. Now, I know your agency is not the only one responsible here, but they can be a large component of attracting and converting the customer to sale. 

Barrie Seppings (23:27): 

Question 12, better together. We’re going to talk a little bit about you as a leader in your history with teams here. How do you make the call between collaborating with someone or particularly helping someone who’s in your team or somebody you’veassigned a task to, and then stepping back and letting them do their own thing? What are the flags you’re looking for? What are you watching for so that you’re not micromanaging, but at the same point, you’re not surprised at the end of the day when they’ve fallen down? 

Philip Meyer (23:54): 

My natural disposition is to trust, to empower, to then be a mentor or a guide, rather than being some sort of micromanaging mentor who’s in there checking what you’re doing right now, and let me see your expense sheet and drill down. I’m kind of not that guy. So trust is at the core of that, and I think from what I did as a manager, I was probably over-trusting, and that’s why I got called actually the delegator. They made a T-shirt up, the delegator with the Terminator’s image behind it, because I would just, “Okay, here you go. You had the idea, you go do it.” And then we’d have… What I then learnt in later time after bad experiences was more about roles and responsibilities, particularly when a team was involved. 

(24:42): 

Right. You’re doing these tasks, and you’re doing those tasks. Let’s get clear on that at the beginning and make sure if there’s anything that flows that lands with you, that you know who’s actually responsible for that, have a transfer of that action that came to you to the right role for doing the job. So that was more about team management in making sure that the people who are in their hole did their job and then if something came up that was somebody else’s job, have those lines of communication at a peer level, first of all. And if they didn’t work, hopefully that would emerge through my meetings with them and team meetings to see where that flow wasn’t happening. But then the learning from that was this key element of milestoning and roles, and responsibilities. 

Barrie Seppings (25:31): 

Question 13 is change your mind. What’s a long-held belief about marketing that you no longer hold, and what caused you to change your mind? 

Philip Meyer (25:40): 

I think the belief that I had was that young people were always the ones who are willing to change and adapt, and old people were stuck in their ways. I don’t agree with that anymore. And I think that’s really significant in the period of AI when I find people of my generation, and maybe because I am that generation now, that I’ve adopted it, but then the research is also coming out and showing the percentage point between people using AI, consumer AI of my age or young is within a few percentage points of one another now. It’s nothing to say if 84% of the population is using some sort of AI in their lives today, GenAI today, generative AI today, we’re talking about six to 10% difference between young 18 year olds and people in their 60s. So that belief I had about old people are stuck in their ways doesn’t hold anymore. That’s where I’ve had the learning. 

Barrie Seppings (26:35): 

Question 14: put your money where your mouth is. Most recently, in terms of effectiveness and ROI, let’s talk in the marketing and the sales world. What tactics or approaches are you seeing, particularly with the partners that you’re working with that are having the most effect, and what are you pulling back or advising people to pull back from? 

Philip Meyer (26:56): 

Okay. Look, something pretty profound happened when I finished with the company. I did a LinkedIn post, and I still get somewhat emotional about it because I didn’t realize that I had that many followers and that many people would make a comment specifically about my post of me finishing up with the business. But to me, 54,000 impressions and over 3,000 reactions and 600 written comments, I didn’t know LinkedIn had that sort of reach and maybe it’s this kind of it’s a trusted reach, and therefore I worry that it will become just a social media engine. I’m not a social media person. I don’t Instagram, I don’t Facebook, I don’t use any of those systems, except in my support of the ThinkUKnow program, which is about child online safety, and that’s a vehicle to get to parents and to get to children to educate them on child safety. 

(27:55): 

And they’re on those mechanisms and those tools that I want to make them safe on. But yeah, so it’s probably leaning more into trusted social media, which is what LinkedIn to me is. I’m still a big believer in person relationships, face-to-face, meetingpeople. I’d love to have done this with you in a face-to-face setting rather than in a webinar. And I know that’s just the two of us, and we’re looking at each other in the eyes through the video stream, but I get that sense of warmth and feedback in a social context, which is in person. And I fear that people have moved away to relying too much on webinars and relying too much, sorry, on podcasts when you still need to have that in-person social gathering. 

Barrie Seppings (28:42): 

All right. Question 15, over hyped and underrated, what buzzword or concept is getting too much airplay in our industry right now? 

Philip Meyer as guest (28:51): 

Barrie, I don’t even think I need to say it. Your name’s got the two letters in it, AI and generative AI. It’s hyped. I won’t say it’s over hyped. I really genuinely believe that AI is one of the most significant dividing moments in the history of mankind. And I’ve talked to a number of people about the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution, the information revolution, digital transformation, AI transformation, and we’re on this hockey stick. And I really think that this, if we can harness it for good and stamp out the evil, this is a massive defining moment that is hyped, but it’s not overhyped. There is genuine excitement and return that can be gained for humanity by harnessing it. The danger is we’re not taking security and governance. I very rarely hear, “Oh, I didn’t know I was oversharing in my business. Oh, I didn’t know I need to classify the data in my organization. Oh, so it’s not safe to put my inbox or my customer data into an AI engine that’s consumer-based because it’s learning my customers’ names and all their marketing details?” 

(30:11): 

You numbnut, didn’t you realize you shouldn’t be using consumer-grade AI and putting company data into it or intellectual property into it? Oh, I didn’t know it was then in training the model, and somebody else could ask a question about it. Look, mate, if you want to do holiday planning and get mystery destinations, fill your boots. But really, when you’re doing work stuff, don’t use consumer-grade AI. But you use OpenAI, ChatGPT at the back end. Why isn’t it as colorful in its answer out ofCopilot? That’s because you’ve trained it on the data in your business. And your data is nowhere near as colorful for good reason as an accountant, as a bank, as an insurer, as what you’ll find out there in the general consumer world, which is full of lies, because people tell it lies and it learns the lies. In your business, quarantine the data, use those large language models, but tell them, no, only work with my data, and do not learn my data from my data to share with anybody else. 

(31:09): 

And that’s absolutely possible in the Microsoft world, and we’re starting to see that emerge in the Google world as well, where you can quarantine and say, “No, you don’t learn from it, and this data is my data.” Good to see. But thousands of other LLMs out there don’t have that content safety rules on it. And I’m even seeing software developers out there at the moment using those, let’s just put it in their consumer-grade AI, booking systems at hotels and other things, which is just, oh, I want to make a booking in a hotel. Oh, this is my name. Oh, table’s free. Some burglar could say, “When is Phil going on holiday, making a booking at a hotel?” Oh, he’s going to be at the Station Hotel 6:00 till 8:00 next Sunday night. Oh, good. I’ll go visit his house. 

Barrie Seppings (31:54): 

Question 16 is the supermodel question. Linda Evangelista, and you might have recalled when this went down, one said, “I don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day.” Clearly, we need to adjust that for inflation. It should be more. Phil, what do you get out of bed for? You’ve been at this close to 35 years. Why do you keep doing it? 

Philip Meyer (32:13): 

Well, I do get out of bed for the dog barking in the morning. So when he wants to get out of the laundry and have a bit of a… So I’m up for that, which is great. He’s my natural alarm clock, as it were. But the first thing I do is go into a learning mode. Soonce I’ve done the habitual things of… The radio goes on with the news of the day, and I do my habitual cereal and marmalade toast, coffee on the stove, and that’s done. It’s back to learning. 

(32:38): 

I love a journey, not a destination, which is a little contentious with the wife. She’s more of a destination person, but she likes five days in one spot with her feet up in the sun. I’m more of the person who’s, “See you later. I’m going to go and check out the historical sites, go to the libraries, go and check out these monuments and stuff.” So I love a journey, and that gets me out of bed in the morning so I can go and do… Which really fundamentally means more learning. So that’s why I get out of bed in the morning. 

Barrie Seppings (33:03): 

Question 17, this ain’t happening. What’s the most unexpected or unusual situational or location you’ve found yourself in thanks to work, thanks to your employment? In the words of David Byrne, “Well, how did I get here?” 

Philip Meyer (33:16): 

Oh, I love that song. It was the early ’90s when I was responsible for what we had as an event here called Windows World. It’s the old Darling Harbour set up, and we’d get all these PC manufacturers, and they’d be setting up the Toshiba and Compact, if you remember Compact and IBM and all these guys would have their computers set up, and we’re there. It’s Windows World. And the unusual situation as I got called aside as the event owner, the organizer, “Oh, I’ve got a really unhappy person here. Somebody’s really unhappy. They’ve come all the way from Wollongong. They’ve driven up, especially for this.” And I went and saw this lady, and she said, “This is so annoying. I’ve come all the way from Woolongong, and there are no windows here. Where are all the windows?” 

Barrie Seppings (33:58): 

Wait, they thought they were at a home renovation thing or? 

Philip Meyer (34:00): 

Yeah, she thought she was going to come and see rose colored windows and various different windows in metal and woodwork, and here we had all these computers running Windows. And the other one that kind of got me, if I can digress, was a surprise and unusual situation is when the late ’90s, Microsoft was going through investigations, and my computer got seized twice, not once, but twice by law enforcement because of emails that were sitting on it. Ah, yeah. And so three of my emails ended up in the Department of Justice inquiries into Microsoft of the late ’90s, early 2000s. I just thought I was doing the right thing trying to win market share, but as it turned out, some of the tactics that we were using, even here in Australia were unethical. So yes, my computer was seized. I got a pretty strong talking to by another set of senior management for not deleting all my emails. 

Barrie Seppings (34:56): 

Afterward that you didn’t get called out for doing the thing, you got called out for getting caught. 

Philip Meyer (35:00): 

Yeah. Yeah. Oh gosh, because I won’t mention names, but a very, very, very senior person in Microsoft was the one who gave me the million dollars to go and buy back the competitor’s product from one of the service providers here. So there’s no point keeping it secret because it’s in the court documents now, but yes, that was one of the tactics of the day is people were buying the other vendor’s product, and I’d walk in with a check for a million bucks. 

Barrie Seppings (35:27): 

Question 18, we’re on the home stretch. Speaking of home, Home Alone, what was the pandemic and the lockdown experience like for you, and what’s residual? What’s been a forever change from that? 

Philip Meyer (35:38): 

Look, we were already very much hybrid working already by then Microsoft. I do recall the moment of lockdown quite vividly. I was in Seattle and at an event, thousands of people, but the Chinese weren’t there. So what’s going on? And this is in February, and we’d heard that there’s been some disease in China and people weren’t allowed to leave China to come to Seattle to attend that event. And then I was flying from Seattle to Singapore to be keynote at an event, and I get to Singapore and in-flight they’d canceled the event. So I’m there in a hotel for three days all on my own as the only guest in the hotel because the whole of Singapore had already then said, “We’re locking down,” but I flew in, got put in a hotel. And I remember the day distinctly, March 23rd, it was in Sydney where lockdown came, which is the same day as my wife’s birthday. 

(36:30): 

We’d had a few friends coming around. So I got the blue masking tape out, the painter’s tape, and I put that on the front veranda, and we all sat two meters away with blue masking tape sitting back, cheersing at long reach with our champagne glasses to celebrate a birthday. Learned a lot about doing puzzles. We did 4,000-piece puzzles in that time, but I guess that’s the story of COVID for me. It would be similar for other people, but we seem to adapt. I feel for the people in Victoria. Victorian people, 293 days, I think, of continuous lockdown. That’s tough on you guys. I remember my daughter’s 30th birthday, and our LGAs only overlapped by our football field. So we met on the football field for her 30th birthday to be able to celebrate that. But yes, there’s some memories, and the enduring thing is maybe where we are now, podcasts, and maybe in the same vein as organizations like the Teslas and the Amazons are saying, you could come back to work five days a week, maybe we need to go back to events more face-to-face and think about that. 

Barrie Seppings (37:40): 

Question 19, all of me- 

Barrie Seppings (37:44): 

Lots of businesses say they want their staff to bring their whole self to work. It’s a trendy corporate phrase. Was that true for you? And when you were at Microsoft, did it feel like that was a place, it’s one of the largest companies in the world? How open and accommodating were they? 

Philip Meyer (37:59): 

I felt this place as my second family, and so when I was asked to be redundant on July three and I put out that LinkedIn post, I did put in it about the fact that I’m not leaving the family. I’ve just been asked to leave the house. So you move out, you’ve got to pay your own way, you got to do your own laundry now. And so I still feel very much part of that family today, and I don’t bring anything different to work as I do to home. 

(38:28): 

But what I will say is I don’t cross the streams, to use a Ghostbusters analogy. I very much do not mix people from work with people from home, nor with my broader family friends through mountain biking, or tennis, or swim club. And I think Imentioned in one of the early answers that importance about even in raising children, having islands, having bridges between the islands, but not thoroughfares and free flow. It’s having that island that you can go to that you feel, I’m having a good time here. This is great because I’m not having a great time on one of the other islands at the moment. 

(39:08): 

So in my dark days of work, and there were dark days at work, I knew I could go home, or I could go to the bike group, or I could go to my tennis group, or I could go to another group. And I encourage parents, if you’re listening, to encourage your children to be diverse in their makeup, keep them poor, keep them busy. The busy is keeping them busy involved in a number of varied activities, so they have different groups of friends, but be the same, be yourself. I don’t like to use the words genuine or authentic. I think they’re overused words these days, but maybe it’s about being yourself and not trying to act to be something you’re not, because it’s too hard to remember all those lies. It’s just be who you are, and if they like you, they like you. If they don’t, move on. 

(39:56): 

And that island can change. And I know in children’s life at school, you’ll find that your child will change or their group will change just with age. And so where they had that friendship in the past is no longer the chemistry’s not there. So you’ve got to have somewhere else they can go where they can have those conversations. Sorry, I’m passionate about this because I’m passionate about the well-being of our children, our next generation. 

Barrie Seppings (40:22): 

Question 20 is secret weapon. Philip Meyer, do you have a secret weapon that you use in the workplace or in your career, and if you do, will you tell me what it is? 

Philip Meyer (40:32): 

I don’t think it’s a secret. I think everybody knows it, they just don’t use it. And maybe that’s the secretivity of it. It’s very simple. Nordic countries use it, and the Japanese use it. Before business, they talk about their personal life. They try and get to know a little bit about somebody else, like we did before we started the call. We talked about some personal things. I didn’t get any children, but we did talk about things that were going on in the world. We talked about other matters. I think it’s really important to invest a little bit of time in getting to know the person as the person, not for the work. And so in Japan, that 10 minutes of tea service and chat, Nordic countries, particularly the Swedes, having a chat before you get into talking about the work. And even when I run my online meetings every month, I have three to five minutes, which is what’s Phil been doing in the last week with some photos of a trip. 

(41:29): 

And I make these things in Sway. People don’t know what Sway is, but it’s actually something you get with Microsoft to very rapidly create a website. And I put pictures in there. People actually hang out. They turn up early because they look forward to getting the tips and trips of what Phil’s been doing, and the holidays and places he’s been in Amsterdam or wherever it might be. I do like traveling, as you can tell, because of what learning it gives me. So sharing holiday stories and sharing stories about your children, I think, is my secret weapon, which shouldn’t be a secret. I think we should all be a little bit more open so we can live in a more harmonious world when we understand the core values of people. 

Barrie Seppings (42:09): 

Well, that was 20 questions. The interview game we play with all of our expert guests here on Plugged In, Switched On. Those answers came from Philip Meyer. He is the CEO and founder of Catalyst 345, and a multi-decade veteran of Microsoft in Australia, APJ, and elsewhere. But before I let Philip go, I did ask him what movie he would take on a VHS tape to play on the desert island with the VHS player. 

Philip Meyer (42:41): 

It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart. Do you remember that black-and-white movie? When a bell rings, an angel is made. And I think there’s a lot of profound messages about some of the things I’ve covered, friendship, support, or family. When things get dark, who do you turn to? And I’ve had those dark moments in my life. I’ll be absolutely honest with you. And there’s a lot of joy and sadness in that movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. So that’s something I can watch over and over again. 

Barrie Seppings (43:10): 

Great answer from Philip. Okay. Before we unplug for this episode, quick recap: Splendid Group is a pure play B2B tech marketing agency where I am the executive creative director and where we make this particular podcast. And when I say where, it’smore of a philosophical where Splendid does not have a physical office. We’ve never had one in the 10 years that we’ve been operating. We are fully digital and fully distributed throughout the world. If you are working in agency land or in marketing and would like to consider working for a remote agency that’s going to let you do the work you love doing in the place you love to live, you should get in touch. Splendid Group is hiring. We do have a number of open roles. Visit us at splendidgroup.com. I’ve been Barrie Seppings, executive creative director of Splendid Group, speaking with Philip Meyer of Catalyst 345 in a 20-questions episode of Plugged In, Switched On., which is our podcast about the conversations that matter in B2B tech marketing. 

(44:12): 

If you’ve got this far, I think that means that you enjoy what we do. Please hit like and subscribe in your pod subscription platform of choice, and you’ll hear us again automatically next month. Thank you for having us in your ears. We’ll see you next time. Plugged In, Switched On. is generated by Splendid Group. Thanks for Executive producers, Ruth Holt and Anna Isabelle Canta.