#264 Bridging the Gap: Professional Skills and Tech Industry Insights with Mark Herschberg

0:00:01 - Mehmet
Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO Show with Mehmet. Today, I'm very pleased to have with me Mark joining me, and I know, mark, maybe it's a little bit late for you back there, so thank you for staying this late with, for you know, having you on the show. The way I love it, mark, is I keep it to my guests to introduce themselves, because I believe no one can introduce someone else better than themselves, so the floor is yours. 

0:00:27 - Mark
Sure, it is a little late, but I am a tech nerd and so I am a night owl, so I certainly don't mind being up this late to do a great episode with you. So my background in brief I've had this very interesting dual career. I began my career when I graduated from MIT back in the 1990s, back during the dot com era, and I started off as a software engineer. Very quickly I moved up into management. I was very quickly leading teams and I've spent most of my entrepreneurial career as a CTO or dual CTO, cpo, chief technology officer, chief product officer, leading different teams. I've met companies from three to 300,000 people. So I've done classic tech startups of a tiny number of people and raising the early funding through the growth stages of the company and through exits Good and not so good exits. I've also helped a couple Fortune 500 companies play startup where they wanted to do something entrepreneurial and they need to bring in outside help for technology, for entrepreneurship, for just some entrepreneurial DNA. So I've done that as well, and that's been across multiple industries. I do a lot of cybersecurity. I've done ad tech and lead generation. I've done media. I've built a number of double-sided marketplaces. In fact I'm on my third labor marketplace, so a two-sided labor marketplace. On the third one of those and these days I work as a fractional CTO, cpo. So different companies around the world will hire me because they don't need necessarily someone full-time, 40, 50 hours a week, but they do need that senior leadership in those roles. That's what they bring me on to do. But now I mentioned I have a dual career, so I have a second career. 

A funny thing happened on the way to becoming a CTO. I recognized, as I was hiring people over 20 years ago, I saw they could answer the technical questions. But when I would ask them questions like what makes a good team player or what's the key to good communication, I'd get blank stares because they never thought about this, they were never taught that. But those were the skills I needed on my team. So I began to train up my team. In fact, I first had to do this with myself and then I wanted to hire people with those skills. 

I began to train up my team and as I was doing this, mit had gotten similar feedback. Companies were saying these are the skills we're looking for leadership, networking, negotiation, team building, communication. This is what we want in people, not just from your school, not just engineers, but all the people we hire. We want to see these skills and we can't. So MIT said, well, we need to address this, and they put together a program, nowadays referred to as MIT's career success accelerator. 

When I heard this was happening and this is over 20 years ago I reached out. I said listen, I've been developing some material for my own training programs. I'm happy to give it to you. I thought it would be one and done here. Take it, good luck to you. But instead MIT asked me to help create more content and then to stay on and teach the class. So, in parallel to my career as a CTO and CPO, I've also been teaching, primarily at MIT but also elsewhere, for over 20 years, teaching these professional skills. And now, of course, I also have the book, the career toolkit, the BrainBump app to help people learn, and I do speaking at companies and conferences around the world. So that's my dual career. 

0:04:04 - Mehmet
Wow, what a career mark. Now, the first question that comes to mind, and you touch on something which is very important. So a lot of times, both here on the show and outside, we talk about why these sets of skills, I would say, are not available during the early education phases, like why we don't give this opportunity, especially for people in tech, because I think you would agree with me, mark Like there is a gap between what I can talk about myself, about what we were taught, whether in school, in college, and then when you go to the real outside world. So why do you think this is not being the standard actually, and the de facto way of teaching so far? Why, of course, now it's good that you have that and MIT they did this, but why it's not the standard. 

0:05:15 - Mark
There are historical reasons for this, and now the first part. So we'll talk about why that's not happening in primary education, in high school, for example, and then why it's not in college. And for high school it will be a little US centric. That's the education system I looked at a little more. I haven't studied education systems around the world, but if you look at the US education system, high school is a relatively modern invention. It dates back about 150 years to the late 19th century, and what was happening at the time is prior to that. 

Everyone grew up on the farm and on the farm you just learned from your parents. If you were a boy, you learned what your dad did, and if you were a girl, you learned what your mom did and you had the skills to basically live on a farm or in a small town. But what was happening at the end of the 19th century is people were now going off. They're leaving the farms and going into the factories. They're moving into the cities, and now you need a different set of skills. You did need to know how to write and how to read, and you need to be able to read the sign saying do not touch the saw when it's spinning, because that's bad. You need to know how to count and how to say well, I'm on the assembly line and I've got four boxes and they have 30 screws each. How many screws do I have? So we need to really instill in everyone a basic level of education and that's what got us started. Now, over the years, of course, we've increased the level of what you need to know. We started adding history and other things, but that became the standard and the US was a big push in late 19th century for this basic education and that was sufficient to work on the factory floor. You didn't need networking skills to be on the factory floor. You didn't have to do a lot of negotiations or communication, you just had to turn the screw really well. 

Now, at the college level colleges, the university system goes back almost a thousand years and here it's a little more global. We look primarily at universities in the. Europe Is very where it grew up, but there's certainly some older universities go back to India and other places, but the university system it's run by professors, and professors. They're wonderful people, but they are people who have very deep, narrow knowledge. And so what happens is you go to college and you say well, I want to study marketing. And the experts in marketing, the marketing professor, say okay, well, if you want to be a marketer, here's what you need to do Take some introductory classes and then these intermediate classes and then pick from some of the high level classes. And if you take these classes plus, there will be some general requirements that the university wants you to take a math class, a language class, whatever they're throwing in, we don't care. But if you take this set of classes, we, the marketing experts, are going to give you a piece of paper saying you have now earned this degree in marketing or accounting or physics or whatever it is. You're studying. Now, what that degree says? It doesn't say you're a good marketer or an accountant. It doesn't even say you're a good employee. It just says you have acquired this level of knowledge in this field. That's all it's saying. 

And that was fine when you went back to mid century and the 20th century. Now, if you think of the corporate bureaucracy where we all sat at those little desks, the rows of people, and your boss came in and said, here's your work, and you would stick in the inbox and you'd say, yes, sir, and you do your work and you put in the outbox and you say what next, sir? Because you were a cog in the machine. You just needed to know how to do accounting or how to do drafting or how to do whatever your role was. And again, you didn't need these more advanced skills like networking and negotiations, you just needed to do the mechanics of your job. 

It wasn't until the late 20th century, as we started to see the middle management get gutted for various economic reasons. At that time we started to see a change in corporate structure and as we got certainly into the 90s and then the 21st century, we now have teams of people where it's not just a strict hierarchy and you have multidisciplinary teams where you're working with people with different sets of knowledge, both functionally but even in terms of your domain. If you think back to the 1950s, the chief marketing officer presumably knew more than the 23 year old recent college grad. But today the 23 year old recent college grad might know more about tick, tock or other marketing trends. 

Then the 54 year old chief marketing officer. And the 54 year old has to say what's tick-tock? What do we do? How do we use it to be effective? And this 20-something year old who used to say do you tell me what to do, sir, and I will do it now says well, I have to take the lead and I have to explain what to do. So we in the last few decades suddenly needed a different set of skills and the university system and the high school system, or education system in general, unfortunately moves very slowly so it has not been responsive to this change in the marketplace. 

0:10:26 - Mehmet
But I think over the next unfortunately it's gonna be about 20 or 30 years it will start to adapt so the question that cups here and you know, from technology perspective, you know like we focus a lot on technology and startups, as I was explaining to you before we start, so Do you think people will start to figure this out Like, okay, why do I have to go to the college in first place? So while I can learn all this outside, um, do you think you know the technology and all what we are seeing? You know around us now with the AI hype also as well, so it's becoming extremely easy mark to get the knowledge to, to get trained even. Um, I've spoken to some of my guests who were on the podcast who are, you know, doing fantastic, you know even jobs when it comes to to to ed tech and combining it with AI. 

So do you think, like this is something that Can hurt the universities if they don't act really fast? And people would say, okay, why should I go? And I know in the us it's a very expensive also even here Uh, if you want to go to a decent university here in the Middle East or you want to go to somewhere in Europe, so it's a decent money that you pay and then after five years, you know, you figure out that or four years. Hey, I can actually save all that money, and you know I can learn that by myself. So what's your take on on that mark? 

0:11:53 - Mark
I do think to your point. The university system needs to evolve. Let's understand what it is that you get with the university degree. There's a couple different things. So one is Facilities, just the physical plant of the university, and that comes in different ways. If you're an English major, a literature major, whatever language you speak, there's not a lot of capital needed. You just need to access the books and have a discussion. On the other hand, if you're studying physics, like I did, there are some pretty pricey Equipment out there that I can't just do in my living room, and so certain things, particularly in the sciences, you may need access to, to just facilities and tools that you can only get at a research institution or at a large university. 

In fact, again, if we look at the history of universities, the way they began Is they all began around libraries. Someone had a library and, of course, a library in the 12th, 13th century. That was a big deal. Someone had maybe a few thousand books. That was a huge collection of knowledge. What's happened is that knowledge, the cost of knowledge, of storing it, of transmitting it, has effectively dropped to zero, and so you don't have that moat around. Here's a group of knowledge, here's a thousand books. That is hard to replicate. I can replicate more than a thousand books just by going to wikipedia. So if you are just acquiring knowledge, then, yes, you can get that information, that knowledge, from different sources, and you don't have to pay for the physical facilities, you don't have to pay any of that overhead. 

But there's two other things that you generally get from a university, and so one of those are three, depending how you break it down. So one is just the interaction. It could be interaction with other students and, of course, one of the important things that, unfortunately, we've been losing a lot here in the us Is that you had people. If we go back a hundred or so years, you had people from this small town and people from that small city who never interacted, would come together in university and have different points of view, and it was in those discussions that you start to learn and appreciate different ways of understanding. In theory, we can replicate that online. Of course, in reality, most of our online dialogue Doesn't work so well. So one is just a mixture of ideas, and I gave the example of students. But even Interacting different ways with professors, with staff, that doesn't happen as much online, and while in theory we could try to replicate. It's really not going to be the same. 

So one is just the interaction with other people. The next is the Network as a whole that you're building up, whether it's the alumni network or the people you know directly. And third is the signal, because if you have a degree from certain places, it signals something about you, and I Learned it was a double-edged sword for me, having a degree from MIT. No one's ever said, gee, mark, I don't know if you can handle the math, this might be a little complicated for you and says, oh, you can handle it, I just I have that branded on my forehead. 

On the other hand, they all thought I didn't know anything about business because you're an MIT guy. You just do numbers. You don't know people. That's not what they teach, so you get that as well. If we can replicate some of that value or trade off that value for the cost, that's where universities are going to start to Lose out. I will note I tend to hire people with college degrees. One of the best architects I ever had never went to college and I thought he was wonderful. You don't have to go to college, but it makes certain things easier. 

0:15:44 - Mehmet
That's great mark and I agree with you. You know, like I believe the biggest I mean benefit of of still going to college is, you know, socializing. You know, even I have I tell my daughter like, look, you're gonna go to college, you know, but this the important thing is you build relationships there. You know how to deal with people and all this. So so I agree on that. 

Now, from from what you have seen more and because you came from the technical background, so I know you know in in in the book, you know the career toolkit book, so there are a lot of things. But if you want to do, I would say, prioritized for someone who, like you and me, we, we come from a technology background, right, so what do you think you know the first thing that should be considered to strength you know our skills in. So if you can just do like kind of a prioritization, so so where should I start? I'm, you know again, it's a Fictionary question I would say, let's say I'm a nerd, right, I may take guy, but I want to be in business because I know this is the way that if I want to go start a business, I need to learn certain skills. So when I start, what's the Number one, number two, number three? How do you break that down? 

0:17:07 - Mark
Okay, so you're, let's say, a recent tech grad Saying I like technology, but I want to not just be a technologist, I really want to expand my scope. The first thing I would do is work to build a network that's not just other technologists. Now, you should keep a strong network of technologists, but if you think about Social media is not the best way to have relationships. But I'm going to use as an example. Imagine if everyone you're connected to is also in technology. What will your feed look like? It's going to be a lot of tech articles, whereas if you have people from different fields from law, from marketing, from finance You'll see things that are in those disciplines that you might not otherwise get exposed to. Now, again, you're not just saying, well, what's in my feed, you're being more proactive, but, again, who you surround yourself with. That's going to impact just the views you take, the information you're exposed to. So work to build a diverse network. That's step one. Step two is to Just start to read and learn in other areas, and let me give you a really Simple example. I use this in the opening of my book. This was taught to me by professor Charles Lizer, said MIT, and is a big, brilliant analogy. 

We're going to do a little bit of math here. Imagine you have a rectangle that's four by ten. You want to increase one of the sides by two units to maximize the area. So which do you increase? Do you increase the long side or the short side? If you need to pause for a moment, to feel free, take a moment to think about the answer, of course, is you take that short side, you go from four to six and that gives you 60 units. Okay, what does this have to do with what we're talking about? Conceptually, what you're doing is you're taking those two extra units, putting on the short side, to have those two units Multiplied by the long side by the 10. If you put the two units on the long side, it's only multiplied by the four. You only get eight extra units instead of 20 extra units. All of us have long sides and short sides, typically more than two, but what's happened is that we focus on our long sides. 

Oh, I'm a technologist. I want to stay in technology and certainly you should strengthen your long side. If I didn't pay attention to a new technology, I'd still be writing with code from the 1990s. I wouldn't be good to anyone. If you're in medicine, learn new medical techniques. If you're in law, figure out what's happening. Where are the new laws you need to know in court rulings. 

We do have to continue to work on that long side, but we get a better ROI, a better return on investment, by focusing on those short sides. So you want to then say I'm good at technology and I'll continue to grow in that area, but I also want to develop those short sides, whether it's leadership or communication or networking, or whether it's just learning about other fields, learning some basic accounting, learning some basic marketing. One thing I really emphasize With my team and we actually, as part of our monthly meetings, do this is Understand what the other business units do. Talk to people in the other departments, ask what do they do in their jobs, what's easy, what's hard, how does your work impact them and how does their work impact you? It's remarkable how few people understand what happens outside the walls of their cubicle. So you want to take that broader view and, of course, if you start to develop a network, that's going to help you do that. So the three things Build a broad network, work on those short sides and then understand the business that you're in. 

0:20:53 - Mehmet
Great insight and I would say, you know, I like the way you put it in a very also like in a flow way as well. So one of the things also, mark, is some people have this belief. You know that. Okay, you know what I'm. I'm speaking again about people from tech backgrounds. You know, like this marketing thing is not mine or like this sales thing is not mine, why do you think you know tech people usually have this belief that they have they are introverts, for example and how actually they can break it like what, what, what you know actions or what you know courses or what books they can you know have a look to so they can break this belief. 

0:21:47 - Mark
There's. So you talked about the narrow belief of focusing on your role and then you talked about being an introvert. So we'll take each of those in turn. In terms of that narrow belief, consider the following If you want to get promoted, you need to deliver more value, because, as your manager, I'm not going to pay you more money unless you are delivering more value to the company. 

How do you deliver more value? Will you understand what your customer needs? Now, your customer might be that external customer. It might even be your customers customer. Your customer might be an internal customer. Oh, we need to build this additional functionality to help the sales team sell more or to help marketing better allies what they're doing. So your customer can be internal or external, but if you don't understand your customer, your customers needs and how they succeed, then you can't create more value. You can sit there and be told build this button and you say, ok, yes, sir, I'll build the button, but now you're not adding value. You're just sitting there as that guy on the assembly line turning the screws, just doing what you're told. You need to be proactive and say I see a way we can do something better. We can add more value, whether it's top line revenue or cost savings or work more efficiently, but you have to understand the business and your customer in order to be able to do that. 

Now you also asked about being an introvert. Nothing wrong with being an introvert I'm an introvert, I'm an extrovert introvert, but I am still an introvert. In fact, at my parties I usually need to take a break halfway through my party because it's a lot of people in my home and I'm a little tired. I'm going to step out for a minute just to kind of take a break. But the thing about networking and building these relationships we think of networking as oh OK, I have to go on the conference and meet lots of people and hand up business cards. Oh, my sales guy, he met 10 people in 20 minutes. How does he do it? That's not necessarily networking. That's exchanging business cards. Networking is about relationship building and it's just going out and meeting people and you can meet people one on one, you can have coffee with them and you can say, hey, 30 minutes is my max, let's go get coffee for 30 minutes and then it's been great meeting you and I need to go. And now I need to sit by myself and not see people because I just drained my batteries and that's fine. Do it in the style, do it in the timeframe that works for you. You don't have to meet and greet everyone out there, but you do have to go talk to other people. This is how you build your network and it's how you understand your customer's perspective and everything. 

I'll give you a simple example. I was talking about this earlier today. I was at a lead generation company. So what we would do is our customers would sell enterprise software or other enterprise services and they'd come to us and say we need to find companies who want to buy our products. Will pay you money If you can say, talk to this vice president here or talk to this director there. Here's for email. That's what it would pay us for. 

And as a CTO, I would get spam. I still get spam half a dozen messages a day from companies trying to sell me, honestly, crap. They put no effort into understanding my business or what I need. They're just spamming me and thousands of other people each day. And what I recognize? Because I understood how lead generation worked. I didn't just say, well, tell me what button to build and I'll build it. 

I understood our business. I knew who our customers were and all of a sudden I recognized wait a second all these people spamming me, their businesses are potential customers. These are the people who are trying to get leads and doing a bad job because they're calling me, trying to sell me something I would never buy. What can I do with this? And what I wound up doing is the salesperson reach out to me and say listen, I will let you pitch me for five minutes. Before you can pitch me, I want your head of marketing to do a five minute call with one of my sales guys. They'd get on the phone and my sales guys say hey, we can help get you better leads so you're not just cold calling and spamming as you did to our CTO Literally generated millions of dollars in business from recognizing that all these people are just sending me spam or potential customers. And that's because I understood the business and understood our process and so I turned that into an opportunity for the company. 

0:26:21 - Mehmet
Wow, you know, I wish everyone would have the same way of thinking like you, mark, because also I learned it the hard way. I used to sit on the other side of the table and I was bombarded by these emails and calls and so on. When I shifted gears and I went to the other side, I started to understand things. But the good the good, I would say thing that happened to me is I can start to build the empathy for both sides. So you know, like I can understand how a customer would react to maybe an email or LinkedIn message or even maybe a cold call, and at the same time, I can understand the frustration for these salespeople trying to get you know, to get to get things there. 

Now shifting gears a little bit, mark, with you and want to talk about something you mentioned at the beginning, that you are now working as a fractional CTO. The question is and of course I had fractional CTOs with me on the show, but again, maybe this is someone the first time who would be tuning into my show and it's good to hear that from you why the market is shifting to this model more and more Now, not only for CTOs. We are seeing fractional CMOs. Chief Marketing Officer, chief Revenue Officer, you know at least these three CTOs CTO, cmos and CROs being fractional. So what's happening out there, mark? 

0:28:01 - Mark
Now the one you didn't mention, that's been around for years, are fractional CFOs, chief Financial Officers. Yes, you're right. And the reason I bring that up not to say how did you miss it, but because they illustrate the point. If you think about most businesses, for literally decades every business needed accounting. You go back 50 years. You still need an accountant to help you with your books, but accounting was not your core business. You didn't need an army of accountants, you just need a little work. You didn't have that senior leadership and that was okay. You didn't really need it, except once a month to just double check their work, or at the end of the year where you're doing the budget and planning process. Certainly at my tech startups, anytime we were doing fundraising, the fractional CFO would show up a little more to help out and do the planning, and we didn't need someone full time. It would not have been a good use of our resources, because then you'd either have an overpaid accountant You'd have this person you're paying the very high price for doing very low level work or you just wouldn't have them at all. So fractional made a lot of sense. You're optimizing, saying for the 10 hours a month I need, I will pay the premium price for that level of work. Otherwise I'm paying just for the level I need. That's more junior, and this was not common in other areas. 

If we take technology, I think back when I was early in my career 20 some years ago I would have a team. We'd start out, we'd get our funding and then, okay, we need to hire 1520 engineers at a minimum, often more. So when you have that many people, okay, there's enough that you need someone in charge of them. You need to manage. I'm not coding. I would do a little early on, but then most of my time wasn't coding because I had my hands full on architecture and strategy and fundraising and managing and everything else. 

But when you look at what's happening today, technology is not necessarily the core part of certain businesses. Even many companies that claim to be tech companies aren't really tech anymore than you could say a company in the 1950s was an electric company. You might have powered your factory with electricity, but it wasn't what you were about. And most companies that say they're tech, they're not tech. Tech companies produce software that does things, but most of these online services, they're powered by technology, but they're not tech innovators. They're just taking things and using it in new ways, just like the factory would use electricity to power tools to do new types of things. So most of these companies aren't tech. 

You don't need the large teams. What took me 20 people 20 years ago, I can now do with two or three people. Well, if you have two or three engineers, do you need someone like me full-time? Probably not, and actually two or three might not need me at all. But when I see teams of six or 10 people especially when they're offshore or they might have a project manager or director you don't need some of my level. If you hire me at my level, well, I don't have enough work, so I'm gonna start coding, but then you're paying a lot of money for me to be a coder. That's not a good use of your time. You can hire people who are probably faster at coding because I don't code 40, 50 hours a week and they're much cheaper. On the other hand, I can do certain high-level things the strategy, the partnerships, the architecture and design that even a lot of good coders. They don't have that experience and so they're gonna be out of their depth doing that. But since it's not a full-time job, they can hire someone like me for the five 10 hours a week to cover that part of their business. 

Now that's the most common model where you say I've got a small to mid-size engineering team and I just need your help, not 40 hours a week, but less. I've had other types of clients somewhere. It's interim. Say, listen, our CTO just left. It's gonna take us six months to hire someone. Just hold down the fort, just show up. You're the guy in charge. It's not gonna be full-time. We're not expecting you to really deliver a lot of value. Just make sure things don't go off the rails. 

I've had other cases of bigger companies where they do have a CTO, but she might say I am so overwhelmed I don't have time for all this. If you could take on this set of projects, this is the stuff that probably is least interesting to me or least important, but I can't ignore it. I'm gonna put you in charge so I can focus on what's important and I know you're in charge there instead of I have to spend 10 hours a week managing it. You're doing that and now I just spend half an hour a week checking in with you. You let me know if I need to jump into anything and I can sleep well and focus on other issues, and then in some cases, I'll just do more project-based work. This generally wasn't as common until 2023 with AI. 

I've gotten a lot of calls from companies say can you just help us figure out an AI strategy? Should we be using AI? Should we wait? If we use it, how should we use it? Where should we use it? Who should we use? And that's usually more of a come in for a little bit, spend some number of weeks working with us and then deliver your suggestions to us and then move on. So those are the different types of fractional roles I do as a CTO, cpo, and you'll see similar patterns in these other areas for marketers and salespeople and others where you just want a little bit of that senior leadership. So you get some on part-time. 

0:33:52 - Mehmet
And do you think this is something which will be the model moving forward, especially for smaller companies? Probably, especially maybe startups, because they really don't need at the beginning a full-time CTO right Absolutely. 

0:34:08 - Mark
In fact, it's funny how many companies over the years they come to me and say I've got a tech startup, we need a CTO, we're gonna have a team of three people. No, you do not need a CTO. You do not need a CTO, you need to hire coders. Hire a bunch of coders. Hire someone like me just a couple hours a week and that's okay, that's not a problem. And especially now what's happening? Global work is now much more prevalent, especially now post-COVID, where companies are more comfortable saying we can work with people we don't see or in different time zones, for the cost of developers. Here in the US you can hire a larger team that might not be in the US, but the more people you have, the more management becomes important. Maybe not 40 hours, 50 hours a week, important, but you need something. 

So I think this will become more common, and certainly when we look at companies, you can automate so many parts. Again, just to use an example 20 some years ago, creating a website for the company was some amount of effort. Oh, engineers, we have to put you up and spend some time creating the website. Now, engineers don't touch the website. The marketing team just uses a WYSIWYG generator to create the website, and so we do a lot more of the basic stuff just over the counter. We can use Salesforce to automate our sales teams, we can use marketing tools, we can use QuickBooks to do basic accounting, and so what's happening is we can do more ourselves or with our small team, but then it's that senior level strategic stuff that you just need to have been around the block a couple times, and that's where you do need people like myself. And so, yes, as more companies say, we can get started on our own and we can run most of the business on our own, but we need those few hours. More and more people like me are needed to cover that. 

0:36:00 - Mehmet
Yeah, totally agree with you, Mark, and to your point, actually, ai helps to foster these kinds of fractional leadership roles, because really, you know what, like, I'm speaking to a lot of people and I'm asking them both on sales perspective and technology perspective. I'm telling them, guys, like, also, there's the fact and actually one of my guests who was the first fraction city I had him on the show, oshry so he brought also the issue of issuing, especially if you already start up giving equity for people who might also leave you down the road and they take the equity and then you lose that equity plus the money that you have paid. So you know, 100% on you with this. So, mark, one thing also still I wouldn't touch on with you, which is probably it's like, not related really to tech, but it's related to trans more, which is the future of media and where are we heading with that? And I know you have some app that you know you told me about before the show. 

0:37:14 - Mark
So also, if you can tell me a little bit more about this app, I'll start with the problem and then how the app solves it, and then we'll generalize this. As an author and speaker, I spent a lot of time in the thought leadership world and a lot of people waste a lot of time in that world. If you think about how thought leaders work and these are your authors and speakers and the people with all these followers and social media they blast out content constantly. So what happens? If you're a leadership expert, you're saying well, I haven't tweeted in two days. Okay, let me tweet. It's three in the afternoon. I'm gonna tweet this piece of leadership advice because I have to just keep tweeting, and tweeting, and tweeting to try and get more People to notice me. And, of course, this is a vicious cycle because the more I tweet and work, the more other people then say oh, there's so much noise, I'm not showing up. I have to put in more effort and create more noise. 

Now the problem with this model this is a push model. We push out our content and I give the example of social media. Same thing with our email list. You put something at three in the afternoon. Well, first half the people say I'm not on social media Whenever the algorithm says this is still relevant, so they don't see it. Even the people who see it say, yeah, that's great, but that's not my problem. I don't have a leadership challenge right now. I have a fundraising challenge or acquiring customers, so I'm ignoring this because it's not relevant. Same thing here are inboxes. You might be on a weekly email list and Again you might see the email, but you say this isn't relevant, delete or archive. Six months from now, now that you've got your funding got, your customers are saying now I have a leadership challenge. Are you digging through your inbox saying did I get an email in the last six months on this topic? Are you scrolling through social media posts saying, maybe he talked about at some point in the past? That's incredibly inefficient, and so the challenge is these models are primary media models are chronologically ordered. This is on social media and email, and that doesn't work. Well, because you just have to blast it out and say well, it's gonna land with some people. What we want to do is invert the model and create a poll model. We want to let people pull the information to them when it's relevant, and so the brain bump app. I'll talk about the app, and this is just one small example and then we'll talk more generally the brain bump act. 

Recognize that where you read information isn't where you need information. You might read a book Sitting at home. So you read my book. It's got management tips as networking tips. You say, well, this is great. 

Realistically, you're gonna forget most of it within two weeks. That's not helpful. I'm not here to sell books. I'm here to help you learn and be better. But you need to remember the information in order for that to happen. So how do I help you remember it? Well, we know spaced repetition works. You need to see it over and over. 

Now I used to take notes on my books. On books I would read but never go back and look at. And If you're studying for the SATs, sure, you're using a flashcard app, you're reading and rereading, but as adults, we're not taking notes and rereading our books or a webinar we saw. So how do we get you to remember that information? So with the brain bump app it's a free app on the app on Android stores we take the key ideas from books, blogs, podcasts, classes, talks, like someone through the book with a highlighter. Here's what you want to remember this and this and this. We put them all into tip cards. So think like flashcards. It's not Q&A, it's just here's the tip, here's that thing you want to remember. Now they are organized not chronologically, they're organized by topics. So think hashtags. Just like on social media, you have hashtags, everything has a hashtag. So from my book, there's management tips, leadership tips, networking tips, communication tips. 

You can use it in one of two ways. Either you say I'm walking into a conference what were those networking tips I read two months ago you pull the app, you tap networking as a topic and then you get all the tips either from my book or my book, plus other books, whatever sources you chose and there are the networking tips that you read two minutes before you walk into that conference. So you got the information that is contextually relevant for you, because if I had just been blasting it out on social media for the past few weeks, you were probably ignoring it. But in this moment, that's when you need it. And being able to access that in under six seconds Open the app, hit the topic and see it that's key, because if it takes you 20, 30 seconds to go search through your phone and find it, you're not going to do that. So that's a just in time access. The other version is the contextual relevancy of the space repetition. 

You might say I'm a new manager and there are some great tips in this book. How do I remember it? Each day at 9 am, you set a reminder. You don't even have to open the app, it just pops up. Here's one of the tips, here's something you read that you wanted to retain and you look and say, okay, right, good point, swipe it away, but two seconds a day, over and over, you retain it. 

Now I gave the example of management tips at 9 am as you walk in the office. Let's say your marriage is on the rock as on the rocks. You need help with your marriage. Well, when do you want that tip? Not at 9 am, you want at 6 pm. Right as you go home and your spouse says you're not present, you might get the tips before you walk in the doors, like how do I be more present? How do I focus on my relationship? 

So it's delivering the content when and where you need it. Unlike those email lists, you could get the daily marriage advice and the daily management advice, but if they're both coming at two in the afternoon that's when you're in the middle of meetings. You're not paying attention, you're so busy, it's not relevant. So, being able to deliver the right information at the right time, this is key, and so what we're going to see are content creators creating more micro content and tagging it in certain ways, and then more tools like the BrainBump app that will let you grab different pieces of information that are contextually relevant based on time, based on location, based on context possibly who you're with or what you're doing and this is a trend we'll be seeing over the next 5, 10, probably going out 15 years in media. 

0:43:47 - Mehmet
I can relate a lot, marc, regarding this point from personal experience, because when I go out there I use LinkedIn most like Twitter or X now from time to time. But I go to LinkedIn because I believe it's for me the best platform and to your point, I agree with you. And now sometimes I wonder do we have a lot of noise out there? Because if you're scrolling just from one platform, we didn't touch on all the other social media and other books and audio books. So just from LinkedIn I can feel that there is a noise, it's a lot of noise. 

And always I ask even I post, sometimes I said OK. So these people, you know that you are posting and it looks like you are doing it not in a mindful way. I would say You're just pushing out content for the sake of pushing out content, and this is something that I don't want personally to do, because when I'm pushing something, I believe it should be a useful content, not for me, because you know I can keep it for myself, I can record my voice and hear it back, but I want to let someone benefit out of it. But unfortunately, it is like we have a lot of noise and I think you know the way you're explaining it. It resonated a lot and I hope you know we see more adoption to this. You know approach, so basically get it in there. So really it resonated. This is my takeaway for today. I would tell you more, honestly speaking. 

0:45:30 - Mark
If we think about this podcast, someone may have just started listening. This might be the first episode. They started listening recently and now you've got great content, evergreen content. Content from six months ago, from a year ago. That's fantastic. That's not old or stale, but someone who just tuned in. Well, they're subscribed now and they'll hear the next episode and the one after that. But are they going to be going through and listening to all the old episodes? Probably not all of them. Now, if they can cherry pick the relevant ones and you can do some of this where you say, well, I'm going to look through the list, I'll look at the titles or maybe who the person is, but if they were tagged by topic, it was very clear this is on leading international teams and this one is turning around a dysfunctional team and this one is how to create a high growth organization. So that's the one I want, and they can go right to that episode without having to scroll through all of them to find the needle in the haystack. 

0:46:29 - Mehmet
Actually you read my mind, mark, because this is one of the tasks I put to myself at some stage. I need to create kind of an index. It's just by category, so people when they come. Okay, as you mentioned, I need to know how to be a better leader for a technical team, for example, because I covered a lot, I have a lot of episodes and I can understand, because I put myself in a normal person who was first time he saw this podcast and say, okay, what is that about? Okay, fine, he covers these topics, but okay, I'm interested in this. So which episodes are there? Actually, I tried something with the new chat GPT functionality, these GPTs where from the show notes, it can at least tell you. I'm still experimenting, but maybe also I would do kind of proper old style, maybe index on my podcast website. So yeah, it's a great advice. 

Mark. 

0:47:26 - Mark
I do on my website. Here's a really simple example On my website I have a blog and, yes, the blogs ordered chronologically. Now, at the time of this recording, I have a little over 100 blog posts. But in addition to that chronological ordering, everything's ordered by topic. So you can say, not just give me the most recent blog posts, but you can say I want those leadership blog posts, and when you select that, it will pull up the dozen or so just leadership ones. Now, some articles are in more than one topic. This might be about communicating as a leader, so it has two tags. It's communication at its leadership, but that's fine, and so you can greatly narrow it down and this is simple thing you can do with today's CMS systems. So for your podcasts, your blog posts, your website, whatever you have, you can do something like this today. 

0:48:17 - Mehmet
True, 100%, mark. You know like, and the technology is allowing us to do also that, so why not? Well, mark, I really enjoyed the conversation with you today. I you know you have a lot and a lot of experience, and I can tell you, I think we need maybe to one time go with each one of these skills for one podcast episode, because I would love, you know, to dig more into, for example, communication. I want to dig more with you in negotiation, you know. So all each one of these ones that you mentioned at the beginning, I think it deserves an episode with you. So thank you very much for sharing your information where we can find more about you and your work. 

0:49:01 - Mark
I'm going to give you two, two and a half different websites to learn more about the book. You can go to the career toolkit bookcom. There you can see where to buy the book Amazon, whether it's physical or ebook. You can get in touch with me. You can follow me on social media. I have my blog articles on that website. I have a number of free resources on the resources page. That's for people who are looking for jobs, people who are hiring for jobs, people just trying to manage their careers. All that's completely free. I don't even ask for your email. Lots of free resources and all of this is at the career toolkit bookcom. Now, if you're interested in getting in touch with me, not for the book but for the fractional CTO work, you can go to my LinkedIn profile, which is linkedincom slash in slash Hershey Don't worry about spying. My last name Hershey H E R S H E Y, like the candy bar. Or from the career toolkit bookcom. From there you can just click the social media links to find me. 

Now I also mentioned the Brain Bump app, which is completely free, and the Brain Bump app. You can find it on the two app stores or you can go to brain bump appcom. So just brain bump appcom. There you can watch a 90 second video that explains how the app works. There's an FAQ and there are links to the stores so you can go download it. The app is free. The content and tips on it are free. It will always be free, because this is about helping you learn and retain what knowledge you're getting, and so that's all at brain bump appcom. 

0:50:40 - Mehmet
Great. Don't worry, mark, all the links will be in the show notes. So guys, don't be worried about typing this. If you go to the show notes, whether you are listening, it will be in the episode details, or if you are watching this on YouTube, it will be in the description. So all the links that Mark mentioned will be available for you. And again, mark, thank you very much for the time today. 

I really enjoyed the conversation and always when people ask me why you do this podcast, I said okay, first I want people to learn and I learned myself as well. So today I learned a lot from you. Thank you very much for sharing the knowledge, and this is how we end each episode. So, as Mark was mentioning, if you are first time visitor here thank you for passing by I hope you become a loyal fan. You like today's episode and you keep following us, whether you're watching or listening on your favorite podcasting platform. And if you are one of the loyal followers, thank you very much for all your comments, for your encouragement and all for your suggestions also as well. 

I really appreciate that. Keep them coming. Even if you're something you don't like it, don't hesitate. Try to do me. I'll try to see if I can make things better. I'm always trying to make things better, and if you are interested to be a guest on the show, don't hesitate also to reach out to me directly. Time zones doesn't make any problem, we can afford it, and thank you for tuning in. We'll meet again very soon, thank you, thank you.