Video Interview: Nigel Dissau, AMD

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A full transcript of the interview follows below.

Johnny Spragg:           Nigel Dissau, thanks very much for joining us on Meet the Boss Television.  I wanted to start really to talk about your business, AMD, and obviously you have consumers which are your customers and you obviously have the likes of Sheila Packard and so forth as well that are also customers as well.  How difficult is it to make that distinction between the man on the street and the big corporation that you also deal with?

 

Nigel Dissau:               It’s actually the classic marketing problem that we have.  We actually have two fundamentally different audiences to deal with.  So what we’ve decided is we break them into what we call the process ______ aware.

 

                                    So those people who go into a retail store or go in, make a decision about a PC with some knowledge of that there’s a processor in there and the processor has a brand and they have some performance and then the processor unaware.

 

                                    So, there’s people who are making PC decisions fundamentally without knowledge of the effect the processor has.  The first group has about 25 million people in it.  The second group has 6 billion people in it.  So it’s important for us to remember which group we’re talking to at which time and our marketing really follows those two chains.

 

Johnny Spragg:           Do you go about almost trying to change people’s view ‘cause you mentioned 6 billion there.  I’m sure those 6 billion are probably people that are quite happy not knowing about that –

 

Nigel Dissau:               Right; absolutely.

 

Johnny Spragg:           So how do you go about marketing to those individuals?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So that’s actually the thing I think AMD has done really interestingly in the last 200 days, which is in September last year we stood up and we said, ‘Ya’ know what?  We’re gonna stop trying to convince the processor unaware that they need to be aware.’ 

 

                                    Our biggest competitor has spent billions of dollars trying to do this and ya’ know what?  I bet if you did the research, ten years later the same number of people are processor unaware than they were before.

 

                                    What we need to do is the thing that I think the computer industry has really failed to do, which is for most non-processor aware, most real consumers don’t really understand why they should buy what technology because if you think about the experience of somebody walking into a retail store, what happens is they go into the retail store and they’re met by an associate who says, ‘Hello.  What do you want a PC for?’ 

 

                                    So the consumer then says, ‘Well I wanna edit video, I wanna look at pictures, I wanna do Facebook.’  Then effectively the associate says, ‘I’m just gonna ignore everything you told me.  How much do you wanna spend?’ 

 

                                    Of course every retail store and every PC manufacturer goes, ‘No; don’t ask that question next.  They’ve given you all the information on what they need.  You just ignored it.’

 

                                    So what we wanted to do was to introduce a point of sale merchandising approach that really help the associate in the store connect what the consumer had just said to the potential PC options they had to buy.

 

Johnny Spragg:           So is it simply about making the message simpler or packaging it in an easier way for someone like myself, the lay person that are probably not that interested in processors, but I am interested in PCs –

 

Nigel Dissau:               Right.

 

Johnny Spragg:           Is it about making the message more simple?

 

Nigel Dissau:               It really is and it’s about everything you buy there’s a good, better and best option.  So there’s the cheapest, there’s the next and there’s the most expensive.  Most everything in retail follows a good, better, best type of format.

 

                                    The question is how do you help a consumer understand whether good, better or best is the right thing for them ‘cause otherwise what they default is buying the cheapest, which in this case is the good, which may actually not solve their problems, but you’ve not given them at all to work out whether they needed anything higher on the scale.

 

Johnny Spragg:           So, just talking, we’re talking about those three messages.  You are responsible for getting those messages out there, the good, the better, the best.  Is it more about the requirements of the consumer and what they need?  So if I am a bit mad on tech and I wanna go out there and edit my own films and do all of that I’d obviously go for the better package –

 

Nigel Dissau:               That’s exactly right.

 

Johnny Spragg:           Is that what?

 

Nigel Dissau:               Yeah; that’s exactly right.  So what we introduced where effectively we introduced a branding called vision ‘cause it was really about the visual impact is the thing that most consumers see.

 

                                    We said, ‘Look, there are basic visions.  There’s a premium series.  There’s an ultimate series.’  So let’s think about this.  My mother uses a PC for very e-mails.  She surfs a bit and that’s really all she does.  Very fairly, for what most people might be thought of as mundane.  A basic vision system is just perfect for her.

 

                                    My wife is the one who’s on Facebook and she’s watching You Tube and she’s doing some more sophisticated stuff.  A vision premium system is perfect for her.

 

                                    Maybe like you I’m a bit more crazy.  I’m doing some video editing.  I’m doing some more complicated graphics type stuff.  An ultimate system is what I need. 

 

                                    If you can just have that conversation with a consumer, most consumers go ‘I get it.  I can put myself in which one of those I’m closest to.’  Then the retail associate can sell them a machine that’s more appropriate to them.

 

                                    If you’re a retailer in OEM we just up sold you.  We just got you to buy something more than just based on price, which is the number one thing that practically every retail and every PC manufacturer and every supplier wanna sell you something more expensive, but if we can’t explain the benefit of your usage we’re just never gonna succeed.

 

Johnny Spragg:           I think marketing, for the way I look at things, is about metrics and I don’t wanna go on about the economic slump that we’re all facing at the moment, but I guess during economic downturns we’ve got to be better. 

 

                                    We’ve gotta be better at our jobs.  We’ve gotta be certainly better than our competitors and I guess what I’m getting at is it’s a way that you use metrics in a clear and meaningful way is probably again more vital now than perhaps it was three or four years ago.  What are the best success metrics that you use here at AMD?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So the thing I’m most interested in is what percentage of revenue am I spending on marketing and what return am I getting for that.  So what I do with the teams, I say, ‘For every dollar I give you to spend on marketing, how many dollars in margining profit are you gonna give me back’ because if someone over here can give me five dollars for every dollar and you’re only gonna give me two dollars, then they’re a much better return on investment.

 

                                    I think in marketing if we’re not careful, we’ve introduced so many metrics that tell us everything can actually help us to do nothing.  At the end of the day it’s really what are we gonna do to generate the profit of the company.

 

                                    So, for every marketing dollar I use, how many dollars of profit do I get back and that’s how we judge our marketing investments.

 

Johnny Spragg:           Is it really that simple?  It’s almost like, well how much money am I gonna get back from this.  Is that probably something that is the backbone of your strategy?

 

Nigel Dissau:               That really is and it’s simple to say.  It’s not so simple to do necessarily, but think about it.  Let’s say I want another $100 million.  The engineering team are gonna say, ‘Well I want another $100 million as well.’

 

                                    So the question is okay, who’s better to give the $100 million to?  Now clearly in a business world there’s some combination of both required, but I never met anyone who thought they didn’t have enough money or didn’t have enough resources.

 

                                    So as we’re all under resourced and under budget, how do we argue for more?  How do we argue that the company invest in marketing and in go to market versus traditional just engineering or sales.  The answer’s by demonstrating that for every dollar we give, we give and we give back more.

 

Johnny Spragg:           I’ve _______ to blog and I know you blog on the AMD website and so forth.  You actually wrote, ‘AMD is using its own chip sets to create the AMD Optron 6000 Series and upcoming Optron 4000 series platforms.’  That’s pretty technical.  How do you communicate the value of your technology to the everyday customer?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So, the everyday customer, so the processor unaware as we talked, probably isn’t coming to my blog.  My blog is really one of the things we use to talk to the processor aware. 

 

                                    That particular blog was aimed at the server market and the server market know what I just said in that blog and what it said is that PCs in reality are not just processors.  They’re processors, they’re things that manage input/output and if there are PCs that people use as a client, there are probably some graphics as well. 

 

                                    AMD had always left that middle piece, the thing that manages the IO effectively, the input/output of memory, to somebody else.  We were taking that in-house.  So that’s an argument I can have with the processor aware.  Server customers are probably the most processor aware because they’re really very focused on workloads and performance.

 

                                    So that’s really a good example of talking to the processor aware audience rather than the processor unaware ‘cause the processor unaware, person walking into Dixon’s or Best Buy or whatever your go may or every retailer, not only is not interested in that stuff.  They just don’t care. 

 

Johnny Spragg:           Definitely.  I want to talk about social media and I know that you’re a champion of social media and you’re a big fan.  As we’ve mentioned, the executive blog that you have on the AMD website.

 

                                    Do you think social media, like blogging, Twitter, Facebook, You Tube is impacting the way that marketing is now carried out within organizations?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So the answer is absolutely.  There is no question to me that that’s so.  So let’s divide this conversation I think into two things.  Conversations and communities.  So if we start with the communities idea, there have been communities for years; forums and work groups and even community organizations.  Go into any industry and they have industry organizations. 

 

                                    Many of those communities have moved online and if in any way you want to really influence that community you have to be engaged where that community meets, which is forums and blogs and places like that.  So as a company we’ve always been there.

 

                                    In fact, in subjects like gaming or enthusiasts, these crazy over clocker people who take processors and see how fast they can run them before they blow up, those are online communities.  We participate.  We’re involved in those.  I think that’s been a very traditional way of working.

 

                                    I think the newer way really is the conversation.  So I think more the Facebook and the Twitter and some of those social media tools are doing is really having a conversation.  There’s a conversation in the industry.  We’re recording this today and the conversation is about iPad. 

 

                                    Everyone’s talking about the iPad and they’re Twittering and Facebook and have you seen it.  We wanna be part of that conversation.  To be part of that conversation you’ve gotta be engaged in it.

 

                                    I think also what lots of brands have seen is if they’re not involved in the conversation something happens to their brand in terms of something bad happens or somebody does something and if you’re not involved in that conversation you can’t in any way control it or influence it.  I’m not sure you can control it, but you can’t influence it or change it.

 

                                    So at AMD we’ve really been structured on both being in the communities we need to and engaging in the conversations we want to be part of.

 

Johnny Spragg:           Can you give me an example of where social media has had a direct impact in the marketing strategy here at AMD?

 

Nigel Dissau:               Yeah; so I think the best one for us is battery life.  So within the way people can buy PCs.  One of the things that is an important things is battery life and in fact, the way that both the OEMs, like the HP and the Acer you talked about earlier and the retailers buy and sell things to each other, battery life can be an important metric in that.

 

                                    As an industry we found the battery life metric that everybody are using disadvantaged us.  So we went and looked a bit deeper and said, ‘Why is that so?’  It appears for complicated reasons.  The metric was really designed off a very bad test and in fact, the battery life test in the industry was based very much on if you turn your PC on, turn the screen to dark, turn the network off and walk away, how long does it last?

 

                                    We didn’t think in a consumer-centric, well that had any meaning at all.  So we really used social media and blogs and Facebook and Twitter and all those things to start a conversation in the industry about is there a better way of doing it. 

                                   

                                    Nothing moves instantly, but what we were very pleased to see is that because we approached that conversation with the humility of by the way, if our numbers weren’t bad we might not be doing this, but they are, but that doesn’t break the merit of the conversation.

 

                                    We really got everybody to rethink battery life and I think the next couple of years you’ll see people talk about and influence in that conversation which may not be visible to consumers, but was visible when the industry changed dramatically because of that.

 

Johnny Spragg:           I wanted to carry on with social media.  I interviewed Jeffrey Hayzlett, who’s obviously the CMO over at Kodak.  We explored I suppose some real business value behind using channels such as Twitter.  He’s a big Twitter fan.  In fact, I follow him and he must Twitter about 20 times a day.  I don’t know where he finds the time.

                                   

                                    But obviously in a more increasingly connected world that we live in, I guess more transparent, do you think embracing these channels has become very important for a lot of organizations and those that don’t perhaps embrace social media as a marketing strategy will be in fear of perhaps falling by the wayside would you say?

 

Nigel Dissau:               Yeah; I think they will, but I think you have to approach this as an audience point of view.  So Jeffrey’s a great example of someone who’s built a community around it.  I follow him on Twitter.  I think he follows me.  We follow each other.  So we’re part of maybe a CMO type community.

 

                                    But if I look at it from AMD’s business point of view, remember the people I probably most want to influence are the processor aware.  So you say who are the processor aware? 

 

                                    Well, they’re people that work for PC companies who are on Twitter and Facebook and they’re journalists and analysts who live on Twitter and Facebook and there are enthusiasts who live on Twitter and Facebook and if you look at that, if you break down the processor aware audience you’re gonna find they’re on Twitter and they’re in communities that use social media. 

 

                                    So I’d have been crazy to not want to engage them where they are.  Now you might be in an industry where you say, ‘Well, nobody in my industry is on Twitter.’  I’m not sure I believe that, but if that’s true, then it all has no influence to you.  If you have any consumer facing then that’s probably not true.  You can find I think isolated instances where there are specific industries where Twitter may not apply, but I bet you there are communities around forums and blogs and stuff that do.

                                   

                                    I think what’s key that people do is they work out where the audience they want to talk to are and then you engage in them.  Yes, there’s an audience of CMOs who talk to each other and it’s a social thing and we meet occasionally and that’s fine.

 

                                    But in terms of real business, I need to find the customers who are the audience I’m interested in and try and influence them.  I’m not a big believer in people who say they’re selling a lot off Twitter.  

 

                                    There are some big numbers given out by companies in terms of a few million dollars, which is great till you discover they’re tens of billions of dollars as a company and that doesn’t justify the expense, but in terms of influencing and engaging that audience in that community it can be very important.

 

Johnny Spragg:           So you talk about being engaging and I think we said the 25 million rather than the 8 billion, but is there a way that once you’ve engaged that 25 million of those processor aware section of society that that’ll affect the 6 billion that just don’t care?  What’s your strategy on that?

 

Nigel Dissau:               Yes; I think it will because within the 25 million are everybody who buys PC that go on retail shelf, the people who specify the PCs at OEMs.  So it’s not just the guys locked in their basements playing games at the end of the day and the crazy web people.  It’s really the people within our industry who are making the decisions influence what turns up on the shelves of the consumers.

 

                                    The world is about 300 million PCs a year roughly.  About two-thirds of those go to consumers.  So 200 million PCs are influenced by people in that 25 million group and by the way, it also includes investor relations people.  So it’s our shareholders, it’s the financial analysts.  There’s a lot of other influence we wanna use as well to return our shareholders the best return.

 

Johnny Spragg:           I guess the people that other people listen to are the people that you’re aiming for.

 

Nigel Dissau:               Absolutely right.

 

Johnny Spragg:           So how do you think you have to manage the cultural change from traditional episodic marketing to the concentric marketing required by forms of social media?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So again, I don’t think I would tell you we do something dramatically different.  I think what we do is we do it in different ways.  You need to continue to have a message, a theme, a storyline, a series of campaigns, a series of tactics.  We haven’t created a separate social media group at AMD ‘cause social media needs to be part of lots of people’s different work.

 

                                    We have somebody who acts as our social media guru specialist and genius who can give advice and guidance to other people, but it needs to be integrated in what you do.  I would tell you the same rules apply to social media marketing than any of them.  Know your audience.  Have a clear value proposition.  Have a clear message.  Know what you’re trying to do and why.

 

                                    I think the risk in social media is the barriers get blurred for some people.  So the question I often get asked by people is Facebook, do you use Facebook?  Now personally I have a Facebook page and I don’t friend people who aren’t my family and friends.  I don’t do work stuff on Facebook.  I don’t see why my work people who I know through work need to know what my niece is saying about something.  It’s just not relevant.

 

                                    If you wanna know what I’m thinking, follow me on Twitter and at some point if we establish a personal relationship, then we might friend on Facebook, but I think you’ve gotta keep some of these things separate, but you’ve got to learn to treat them as standard marketing – I wouldn’t share my family pictures with everybody I meet in the street.  Why would I do that in a social media context?

 

Johnny Spragg:           I want to just move focus a little bit on the economy and I know we’ve touched on it slightly earlier.  So the economy and marketing.  What impact has the economic crisis had on your marketing strategy and have you had to change perhaps the way you go about doing things because of reduced budgets or perhaps budgets haven’t been reduced?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So I think AMD has been through a fairly dramatic transformation the last couple of years.  If we were sitting here two years ago and we were talking about the things that matter to AMD or the issues for AMD as a business and then thought about the ones that were today, they would be completely different.  That’s how much AMD has transformed.

 

                                    So during that transformation the economic stability has been going on.  So it’s quite difficult to see how much of any budget changes are because of the economic instability or how much of them is because we needed to make those transformations anyway.

 

                                    As a marketing person what I’ve been most focused on is verbalizing our budget is how do we make our marketing budget not something that the marketing people sit and dream up, but actually the finance team could say, ‘Oh, we know what business you’re going to do.  Here’s a set of equations.  We press this button.  This must be your marketing budget and if you do more we’ll give you more and if you do less you’ll get less.’

 

                                    So much more focused on verbalizing the budget so everybody can see the connection they have to the business than worrying about whether the economic issues have affected the budgets.  We didn’t just cut budgets because the world was going into economic crisis.  We weren’t selling as much so we didn’t need as much marketing funding.

 

Johnny Spragg:           So the overall strategy, what would you say has been the biggest change within your marketing strategy for your department?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So I joined a couple of years ago and I think that the thing that we’ve been really focused on for the last couple of years is thinking through a consumer-centric view.  I think AMD was a very traditional semi-conductor marketing organization, which was we need to take our products and send them to the market.

 

                                    What I’ve tried to do with the team is say let’s go the other way as well.  Let’s listen to the market and push back in again and try and get those two things to meet.  So it’s the voice of the customer was much more obvious. 

 

                                    That’s why at the start of this conversation we talked about vision and usage and customer scenarios and that’s really where we’ve been focused on is how do we really understand how this stuff’s used ‘cause if we understand how it’s used and how it’s bought, we can really put together the right stuff to make it more successful for the company.

 

Johnny Spragg:           What affect I guess would you say a shrinking economy has on the productivity and the engagement of your employees?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So I don’t think that there is a connection between a shrinking economy and the productivity and the employees.  There may be personal issues.  There clearly aren’t as many people employed here in marketing as there were.  So for them that’s a considerable thing.  Whether that was the economy or whether we had the wrong skill in the wrong place, there’s a mixture of both, if we’re honest, in there.

 

                                    I think what the economy does is it makes everybody and really a tightening for everybody because everybody wanted to go back and ask some very basic questions.

                                   

                                    So I think in high technology one of the problems that marketers have is they, as I would tell you, they got lost in the boundary of the opportunity.  They don’t focus on the bull’s eye.

 

                                    So typically what I would always ask a team is to go back, focus on the bull’s eye.  What’s the one thing if we could only sell this one thing to one person, who is that.  I think what happens is as companies get more successful they get very excited by things in the boundary of the opportunity and they get lost looking for things in the boundary.

 

                                    I think what economic difficult times tend to make you do is go back to the bull’s eye, really go back to your central thought.  Who is our central customer.  How do we deliver them value.  Then as things get better we’ll expand that bull’s eye out.  But that I think is the number one thing that people find is they have to go back to the bull’s eye.

 

Johnny Spragg:           As a chief marketing officer here at AMD, how do you on a daily basis try and inspire, create excitement within your team, within the employees when of course budgets have been cut and as you said, you don’t have as big a team as you had perhaps two or three years ago, how do you get them excited?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So I think part of making people motivated to be good marketers is give them good role models.  So we’ve done quite a lot of leadership change and brought in some new faces and some new leaders.  I think what everybody wants to do is the best job they can do. 

                                   

                                    I typically tell the team that there’s really a couple of things here.  One, I’ll try and put the best leadership team in place and give people the change to be promoted to that leadership team.

 

                                    But a personal level I only do three things.  I’ll make you think more broadly than you might have thought before.  Then I’ll ask you to move more quickly than you want to move and then I’ll help move obstacles out of the way.

 

                                    That third one, the moving obstacles out of the way, is really an essential one.  I think if the teams see that you’re on the side, that you’re engaged and you’re willing to go to bat for them, for the right reasons and the right context, and move the things that affect their ability to execute out of the way, then you’ll motivate the team.

 

                                    I think there are other things you have to do.  You have to create a proper marketing career structure.  There are some very hygiene based factor things that you would do when you were creating any role in a company, but I think knowing that you’re there and supporting them and backing them and helping them solve their problems when they need you is the most important thing to do.

 

Johnny Spragg:           Fantastic.  I want to talk a little bit of marketing 101.  How do you go about measuring your marketing effectiveness?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So, our marketing effectiveness is really about the return of investment we get for our marketing dollar.  So there are a thousand things to spend money on.  The return, we actually have metrics by channel of the ratio of marketing dollars to the contribution margin, which is our gross profit metric that we return.  So that’s the most granular method.

 

                                    Then what we’ve been doing is putting fairly detailed score cards underneath that of okay, what are the things that influence that number and really tracking down.  I think one of the things that marketing people have to do much more is think through the metrics that don’t only mean something to them, but mean something to other people. 

 

                                    Sometimes you see marketing teams coming out with metrics that are really important to them, but when you put them in front of a CEO or a CFO or a sales rep they go, ‘I don’t know what that means.’  So you have to do a bit of selling of your abilities by putting metrics in front of your colleagues that make sense.

 

Johnny Spragg:           Do you think there’s ever a danger of marketing running ahead whilst production can’t keep up?  How do you manage that challenge?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So I think the challenge for us in that type of world is not generating demand for a product we can’t yet fulfill.  So a semi-conductor world, it’s 2009.  The product we decide we’re gonna have in the market in 2010 and 2011 have been designed.  The products for 2010 are being tested now. 

 

                                    So in terms of our engineering team, they’re already two years ahead.  So I know what we’re gonna be saying in the market in two years.  The trick is not to be saying it today, but not to be generating demand for something I can’t fulfill, either ‘cause I might give my competitor an advantage or tip them off to something we’re gonna do or even worse, stall the current customer.

 

                                    So I think that the key trick there is to be synchronized as a team about what the market needs today and how what you can fulfill, how what you fulfill matches that market need and resist the temptation to go chase the next thing that may not be relevant and may not be ready.

 

Johnny Spragg:           So what systems do you have in place to keep that synchronicity, to keep your team synchronized to know exactly what your plan is?  It sounds like everyone really has to know 100 percent exactly where you’re going today, tomorrow, next year and almost to the date.  How do you meet those challenges?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So we have quite a regular set of cadence and communication as a team.  So monthly we do something called AMD marketing live, which is a conference call I host, which really talks to everybody in the marketing company.  We focus less on business and more marketing type issues and learnings and sharing experiences. 

 

                                    Once a quarter we do what we call a town hall, which is a worldwide video conference where we deal with some of those strategic issues and where the products are.

 

                                    But mostly what we try to do is have a series of meetings at various different levels in the company and a set of processes, particularly around launches and around communication that keeps people synchronized. 

 

Johnny Spragg:           Some of our viewers I suppose are hoping to be the market leaders of the future.  What career advice would you give them?  What three things would you say that you’ve stood by or you’ve run your career by?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So I think there are three things I would tell you that I look for in someone coming up underneath.  There may be more than three, but there’s fundamentally three.  I always ask what content does this person have.  I think there’s a sense that sometimes people don’t value what they know and that’s not true.  You get invited to the top table first of all, about what you know, what you contribute in terms of contact.

 

                                    So I’d always tell people to collect as much content.  This is like a video game.  Before you move to the next level, collect as much content as you can.

 

                                    The second one is around approach.  So what can you do with that content?  How can you drive a team?  How can you get output?  I think that’s the second thing.

 

                                    So the first thing that brings you to the table is what you know.  The second thing is what you can do.  How you drive a team.  How you get results.

 

                                    I think the third one is network.  I would tell people that all the way through their career build networks, both internally and externally.  When I look at a candidate, particularly someone for a management job or a director’s job or a VP’s job, I always ask what content do they know, what can they do with that content and who knows them and it’s building the combination of those three things that most people will do to really build a career.

 

Johnny Spragg:           so for you personally would you say that those are the three I guess values or attributes that you had that you built your own career on?

 

Nigel Dissau:               Yeah; that’s really what I’ve tried to do.  I’m not sure in hindsight I knew I was doing that, but I was very lucky.  I was able to – 19 years at IBM.  I changed my role fairly often.  I spent some years at a company called Storage Tech and then at Sun and now at AMD.

 

                                    I’ve done lots of the roles.  If you look at marketing roles, there’s almost no marketing role within AMD at a country, at a regional or at a worldwide level that I haven’t at some point done.  Doesn’t mean I did them well.  It doesn’t mean I could do them as well as the people that have them today, but I’ve done them.  I’ve collect content, I’ve connected approaches, I’ve built a good network.  That I think is what people need to do.

 

                                    There are other things you need to do as well, but I’ve tried to build on those things and I think that’s what’s helped.

 

Johnny Spragg:           Did you always have – you’re obviously very successful – did you always know and believe that you were gonna be successful, if it was marketing or with your game plan from the word go?

 

Nigel Dissau:               No; I actually spent my first ten years in the field in a small IBM branch office in the UK and I’m not sure I knew IBM U.S., the big corporation was there.  I was spending my time with customers either as a systems engineer, which was technical sales support or as a sales person. 

 

                                    In many ways, that’s probably the best investment of my career because I got to spend time with customers.  I was at the sharp end.  I then transitioned into marketing roles and transitioned into corporate roles and I look back on where I am today and it’s slightly surreal to me ‘cause I remember the kid that went and did that first job in a branch in Basingstoke, England.

 

                                    But I do think those early days were very successful and I would tell  people who become impatient about how fast they’re moving that your career is not a sprint; it’s a marathon and you need to spend the early formative years collecting that content, collecting those skills, building that network because it will accelerate you later.

 

                                    I see some people who leave from college.  They go work for a year.  They go do an M.B.A.  Then they come back again and suddenly they want to be running the world.  Without the skills, as I said it’s like a video game, without the skills at one level you don’t succeed at the next.

 

Johnny Spragg:           So was IBM your first job out of college?

 

Nigel Dissau:               It was; yeah.

 

Johnny Spragg:           So if you could go back to Nigel Dissau, back then on his first day, what advice would you give him?

 

Nigel Dissau:               That’s a great question.  What advice would I give him.  Just work hard, try hard.  Strangely enough one of the pieces of advice I got on my first day, which is if you make a mistake, admit it quickly, be honest.  Just let your career come to you.  Work hard.  Let it roll out.  It’s a long race.  You’re gonna work for 35 years, 40 years maybe.  Yeah; it really matters if I think to be successful where those last ten years are and what those last ten years look like.

 

                                    But there’s the other 25 to 30.  If you don’t spend the time preparing you’ll never get to that end game/

 

Johnny Spragg:           So I wanted to ask, was there at any point I guess in your career – you said you spent 19 years at IBM – was there any point where you had to change tact and you just thought to yourself just this isn’t going right at the moment.  Obviously you’ve made the right decisions because you’re now the CMO of AMD, one of the most successful and innovative companies in the world.  So was there a time that you had to reassess?

 

Nigel Dissau:               I think there is for all of us.  There’s something that I’ve called the mid-career crisis that finally happens about 19 or 20 years into your career, which is you look back and you say ‘Am I where I wanted to be?  Have I achieved the things, either the financial wealth or the stack position, whatever it is that I really wanted to do.’

 

                                    I think lots of people go through that and mine happened about 19 years into my career, which I was still at IBM.  I looked at where I wanted to get to and I said, ‘I’m not gonna get there from here.’  So I have two choices.  Either I reset my expectations to being I’m happy with where I am and I’ll keep going at the pace I’m going on or I’m not happy with where I am and I need to make some changes to accelerate myself and that implies some risk.

 

                                    I really took the second one, which was I do wanna go a bit further in my career, I wanna have more influence or I wanna have a seat at the top table.  That’s gonna take me longer at IBM than I want to, longer for me to be achieve maybe some of my financial objectives.  So I’m willing to go and put myself on the market and work a bit harder and do different things.

 

                                    But I think people do come to that point.  It’s often about halfway through their career, but they have to make that decision whether they’re happy with what they’ve achieved and they’re willing to go at that pace or whether they have to make some changes and it’s a tough decision.

 

                                    I was lucky.  I was married, but we had no kids so it was a much easier decision for me than it might have been for others.

 

Johnny Spragg:           You mentioned earlier about your job is 35-40 years if you’re lucky.  It’s a marathon; it’s not a race, but there must be a balance, mustn’t there, for a person in a similar position that’s perhaps got a hunger to someone that’s saying, oh, I’m just gonna take my time.  I’ve got 35 years.  How do you find that balance?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So I’ve never been a believer in work/life balance.  I think work/life balance is a myth that was sent around to confuse people and to justify something.  I think life is a series of choices and I think you have to make a set of choices at all point.  Sometimes you’re gonna choose to work harder and sometimes you’re gonna choose to spend more time with your family.

 

                                    Life may deal you a set of cards that says – I had a lady boss once who took a leave of absence for some point because she had a member of her family who was very ill.  She took a series of choices that were right for her lifestyle.

 

                                    So I think all the way through life we’re gonna find ourselves with those choices and we have to make the ones that make sense for us.  I would tell you there’s one other piece of advice that I think fits in there, which is really a piece of advice you could get from Alice in Wonderland, where Alice says to the Cheshire Cat, ‘Which way should I go?’  And the Cheshire Cat says, ‘Where are you trying to get to?’  Alice says, ‘I don’t know.’  In which case, says the cat, ‘It doesn’t matter what direction you take.’  That is true of your career.

 

                                    Unless you have some sense of where you’re trying to get to, then any route is fine.  The moment you get that sense of destination of where you wanna be fundamentally when you retire, what are you trying to achieve, you can then back up to work out where you need to be.

 

Johnny Spragg:           So do you really believe that there is no – you’re either a worker or a family guy?

 

Nigel Dissau:               No; I think there’s a combination, but it’s always a series of choices.  The fact that you believe that you can achieve some equilibrium without making choices I think is unrealistic.

 

                                    I think in the early days of your career you tend to make choices that are much more based on your career.  As your career goes on you’ll make choices based maybe more on your family or whatever it is, but it’s always a series of choices.

 

                                    I have people on my teams who say, ‘Well hey, my kids are still in school.’ Or ‘They’re just coming out of college.’  And that restricts the jobs they can go for or the things they wanna do and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.  There’s nothing bad there.  It’s just a series of choices.

 

                                    I think if people get themselves into a mental state where they can achieve some Nirvana of balance, they’re deluding themselves that really they’re making a series of choices and those choices have implications.  Either good or bad, they’re just choices.

 

Johnny Spragg:           I’ve wanted to I suppose a final question really with regards to marketing and what do you – we’ve talked about social media.  What do you think is the next big thing with marketing?  How do you think the corporations are gonna change perhaps as strategy moving forward?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So I think the next big thing in marketing is the last big thing in marketing, which is what is marketing.  My definition of marketing which I freely fundamentally stole from the Charter Institute of Marketing in the UK is understand what your customers need and work out how to get it there. 

 

                                    So I think that doesn’t fundamentally change.  What fundamentally changes are the tools by which you’ll do that, whether they’re interactive tools or communication tools or web based tools or whatever the tools are, the role of the marketer is always gonna be about understanding what the customer needs and communicating that back through the business.  Then helping the business take that value and getting in the market what the price is that that deserves.

 

Johnny Spragg:           So is there a way from being a heavier marketing department, is there a way that you can prepare for the next big thing or is there any preparation or you literally just having to be respondent to whatever’s going on around you?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So one of the things about being the chief marketing officer is you clearly have to get yourself above the noise at some point and look around.  So for me it was when I joined AMD.  I’d been at Sun for a number of years. 

 

                                    Blogging was something that was very prevalent at the Sun, but it really wasn’t something that was prevalent here.  So I needed to create and build a case for why blogging was an important thing to do and why I should blog and why other people should blog.

                                   

                                    So I think often what the chief marketing officer needs to do is look at the tools and the techniques that are the next set of influential tools or collection tools or whatever they are and be there trying them and extolling them and getting them in. 

 

                                    That requires often a lot of selling, some political capital to be used I think, but that’s part of your role is help take that team, think a bit more broadly, move a bit more faster than they’d want to.

 

Johnny Spragg:           You mentioned Sun and obviously as you said blogging was I suppose a piece of content that you picked up, a skill that you used –

 

Nigel Dissau:               Yeah; absolutely –

 

Johnny Spragg:           -- and brought here to AMD.  So are there things that you’re doing which perhaps you’ve not done before?  You’re creating your own content here at AMD rather than using perhaps skill sets that you’ve learned from elsewhere?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So I create new content every day for myself and I’m actually really sensitive to never stop learning, never stop reading, what are the right business books, what are the right series of things.  My career has been 20 plus years of learning and listening and understanding.

 

                                    So I think every day is a learning day.  I think every day is in terms of new approaches.  I think I’m lucky that if because of the way I’ve had a career, I’ve built models and tools and techniques over that and this is the approach that I’m talking about, that I can quickly deploy, but I learn new ones every day and I use consultants all the time.

 

                                    I really encourage people to really get outside thinking in ‘cause no one has the monopoly of thinking.  So I never stop adding new content.  I never stop adding new approaches and I never stop trying to build my network both internally and externally ‘cause that makes me more effective at what I do.

 

Johnny Spragg:           What would you say is probably the most important thing that you’ve learned so far this year?

 

Nigel Dissau:               The most important thing I’ve learned this year is that – well I learn it every year.  It’s something I learn every year, which is the customer knows what they want.  The market knows the answer.  So we’ve been doing quite a lot of research into one of the areas of our business in the market and everybody’s got an opinion, but ya’ know what?  The market knows the answer and you just gotta go listen.  If you go listen the market will give you the answer.

 

Johnny Spragg:           I promise you this will be the final question.  I’m a true believer that I think every good organization successful is built on a number of mistakes that have been learned and hopefully not repeated. 

 

                                    What would you say has probably been – throughout your career.  Not talking about AMD, but throughout your career would say is your – I use the word favorite, but your favorite mistake that you’ve learned from and moved forward on?

 

Nigel Dissau:               So I think there have been a number of times when the mistake I’ve made, which is to assume that I knew better than the market and I can tell you that I did some of that with the Storage Tech business.  I did some of that at IBM. 

 

                                    That I lived at what somebody used to jokingly call the reading edge of technology that the rest of the world is where you are.  So you stand up and you say something and you say, ‘Well this is just brilliant.  Everyone needs to know how brilliant this is.’  Everyone looks at you and says, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about and I really don’t care very much.’ 

 

                                    Three years later you go, ‘Shit, I knew I was right.’  But it’s getting ahead of yourself and I think we learn that all the time that those of us particularly in high technology industries, those of us who are gadget freaks and like playing with toys, if we’re not careful we get completely ahead of our market and we have to wind ourselves back to where the market is and really focus on fulfilling those needs.

 

Johnny Spragg:           Is there any particular example perhaps in your career __________ --

 

Nigel Dissau:               Yes; and there’s no way I’m going to tell you what _______ --

 

Johnny Spragg:           Oh really?  Jeff Hayzlett tells me – well you watched it.  You probably heard when he was talking about his text in a cinema, but then realized that two months down the line where no one would actually text for this or whatever, that everyone turned their phones off when they went into cinemas and they had a whole marketing team there that _______ --

 

Nigel Dissau:               Yes; we had some of that at Storage Tech on encryption.  So that everyone was going cryp tapes and that everybody – ‘cause a couple of tapes had been stolen by somebody and this is industrial tape ________ that absolutely – so we really launched this whole thing about security.  The market was just a year away from caring about any of this.  It was trying not to drown on other things.

 

                                    So I’m afraid I have a lot of instances over my career of things that in hindsight I was too soon or completely wrong about.

 

Johnny Spragg:           Well it can’t be too bad to be ahead of yourself.

 

Nigel Dissau:               Thank you.

 

Johnny Spragg:           Nigel Dissau, thank you very much indeed.

 

Nigel Dissau:               Thank you.

 

[End of Audio]