Mike Hayes is the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at VMware. He joined VMware in October 2020, and leads the company’s worldwide business operations and the acceleration of the company’s SaaS transition. Prior to joining VMware, Mike served as Senior Vice President and Head of Strategic Operations for Cognizant Technologies, where he ran a $2B P&L for Cognizant’s largest financial services clients. Mike previously spent four years at Bridgewater Associates, an investment management firm, where he served in Chief of Staff to CEO and COO roles. Prior to Bridgewater, he spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy SEALs where his career began as one of 19 graduates from a class of 120. Mike served throughout South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, including the conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. His last job in the Navy was the Commanding Officer of SEAL Team TWO, which included ten months as the Commander of a 2,000 person Special Operations Task Force in southeastern Afghanistan. Before that, Mike was selected as a White House Fellow (’08/’09) and served two years as Director, Defense Policy and Strategy at the National Security Council. 

Episode transcription:

[00:00:00] Mike Hayes: [00:00:00] Hi, my name is Mike Hayes. I'm the chief digital transformation officer at BM where I've been at VMware for about six months. I'm responsible for running global business operations and transformation. VMware is a large software company based in Palo Alto, Califia. And I was having a great time. And before VMware I spent 20 years in the Navy seals and also then four years at Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, four years at cognizant technology. It's a large IT services firm where I ran a $2 billion P and L for all IT services sold into the financial services vertical. So eclectic background, a little bit of a lot of things. I know I'm an inch inch deep and a mile away.

[00:00:58] Jahn Karsybaev: [00:00:58] That's awesome. Mike really appreciate your time to join us on the Ivy Podcast today. Very diverse backgrounds. So I want to dive a little bit deeper into that and obviously talk about some of the things that you are building now, your book and all of that great stuff. First things first shared with us. What falls under your purview within VMware right now? What are you responsible for? And then we'll go from there.

[00:01:18] Mike Hayes: [00:01:18] Absolutely. So everything starts with people. So let me talk about the team. And one thing that I think is really important is that I never say anybody works for me. It's only with the preposition should always be with never, never for. And so the people I'm privileged to work with on my team are the chief data officer, the chief information, the chief security officer and an integration, and then a and then a few other elements. And I run what's called our operations leadership team. We have three leadership teams across the firm. The OLT is the operations leadership team. The PLT is the product leadership team. The GLT is the go-to-market market leadership team. I'm a member of all three and run the OLT.

[00:02:03] Jahn Karsybaev: [00:02:03] Wow. That's super exciting. Definitely a huge enterprise and very diverse leadership team. And I like what you said in terms of team members working with me versus for me it seems so simple yet, very powerful and oftentimes overlooked concepts when it comes to servers and leadership and things like that. Which leads me to another point: your book that I want to dive a little bit deeper into never enough. Can you at a high level, tell us what was the motivation behind the book. And then I want to spend some time talking a little bit further about that.

[00:02:36] Mike Hayes: [00:02:36] I'd love to, first of all, we should start with the title. Never enough is intentionally provocative. It can sound a lot like fame and fortune. We never have enough material goods or status or what